


Gold and Light

by story_monger



Series: Triptych [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Dysphoria, Fem Castiel - Freeform, Fem Dean, Fem Trans Sam, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Hurt/Comfort, Team Free Will, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 13:00:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2773949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/story_monger/pseuds/story_monger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <img/>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The Winchester sisters are already barely holding things together when Dean is left handicapped after a hunt. With Castiel still stuck in Purgatory and Dean starting to spiral dangerously, Sam is left scrambling to pick up the pieces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gold and Light

**Author's Note:**

> Acknowledgment and thanks are in order:
> 
> Thanks to [truthismusic](http://truthismusic.livejournal.com) for her art. 
> 
> Thanks to [alethiometry](http://alethiometry.livejournal.com) for her last minute read through.
> 
>    
> [[Art Masterpost]](http://truthismusic.livejournal.com/23185.html)
> 
> [[Playlist]](http://8tracks.com/story_monger/triptych)
> 
> [[Inspo Tag]](http://story-monger.tumblr.com/tagged/their-triptych)
> 
> Finally: for full disclosure, I am a cis woman. I've done my best to listen to what trans women have to say about their experiences, to do my research, and overall present a decently realistic/respectful sense of what Sam's experience as a trans woman would be. If I've gotten anything wrong or misrepresented anything, PLEASE don't hesitate to let me know. I am still learning, and would like to know if I screwed something up. Thank you!

Their first night in the apartment, and they don’t even have a sleeping bag. They used to have one, Sam thinks—knows—because the whiff of moldy nylon brings back memories of a tight, warm space and listening to the creaks of an unfamiliar house. But the sleeping bag disappeared between one motel and another, or never found its way back into the trunk after that truck plowed into the Impala, and even though Sam never liked the thing, she wishes they had it now.

She briefly considers driving to the Wal-Mart they passed earlier but then remembers that driving tired is worse than driving drunk.

Instead, Sam leaves Dean propped against an off-white wall – Dean muttering to herself around a drugged stupor – and goes back out to the Impala to scavenge for supplies. She finds a small, dingy travel pillow, three felt blankets, and two duffels of clothing that, she decides, will have to do the rest.

“’m hungry,” Dean announces when Sam reenters. Her eyes have trouble focusing on her sister. “Y’re too tall.”

“Yeah.” Sam dumps the pillow, blankets and duffels on the floor next to the doorway and reaches into her pocket for the keys she’d picked up earlier that day. The woman who’d handed them to her, who’d helped her sign the lease, had been pretty and motherly. Sam still feels her business card in the back pocket of jeans that should have been washed three days ago.

Sam’s eyes flick to the washing machine and dryer she can see tucked in a closet in the kitchen. No more laundromats. The idea makes Sam jumpy somewhere in the pit of her stomach.

“Whaddoi hafta do for a fucking burger?” Dean asks. Sam snorts, because there’s really no other answer, and locks the door with a satisfying grinding of metal. Any hunter could probably kick through it in a pinch, but it’s the principle of the matter.

“Hang on, Dean.” She ruffles her sister’s hair as she passes, earning her a sour grunt. It takes a minute, but Sam eventually locates the fresh container of salt she brought in earlier. Keeping one ear to Dean’s mumbles, she lays down a neat, fat salt line along every entrance then covers the salt with thick swathes of duct tape. She makes her way around the apartment, methodical and careful.

“Saaaam,” Dean whines, and Sam emerges from the second bedroom to find Dean trying to stand. The drugs send her in lurching directions.

“Hey hey hey.” Sam jogs across the postage stamp of a living room, salt and tape still in hand, and tosses them on top of the pile of blankets to grab at Dean’s shoulders. “Hey,” she says again. “You’re okay.”

“Fuckin’ not,” Dean sags slightly, letting her head slump against Sam’s shoulder. Her hair falls in a greasy, unwashed mass across her face.

Sam doesn’t say anything and reaches down to tuck the hair behind Dean’s ear. It reveals her sister’s nose snubbed against Sam’s chest. She suddenly looks too much like the ten-year-old Dean with skinny calves and a look of complete concentration when she practiced shooting cans in Bobby’s scrap yard. Sam feels her lips thin as she jostles her shoulder.

“You want food or not?” she asks. Dean grunts.

“Why’d you make me go to a hospital?” she asks. “I hate hospitals. I smell funny now. Smell like _hospital_.”

“Not one of those things we could take care of by ourselves,” Sam says. “Not this time.”

Dean laughs abruptly. “Coulda cut it off,” she says, and her voice enters something forceful. “Cut it off and—and cauterize it with an iron like they did in Boondock Saints. God I love that movie. It’s like us, right? Only chicks. With monsters. And we know that God’s actually a deadbeat dad and angels are dicks.” She pauses, and Sam can feel her frowning against her chest. “Castiel’s alright. Only a sorta dick.”

“Only sorta,” Sam agrees, and she pushes against Dean’s shoulder. “Sit back down, will you? You don’t need a concussion.”

“Mmph,” Dean grumbles, but she does as Sam asks. Sam keeps her hands on her sister’s shoulders all the way to the floor. They remain there even after Dean lolls her head back against the wall. She watches Sam through glittering slits of green.

Then she lifts her right arm and examines the misshapen outline of her hand through the bandages. “Ugly, in’t it?”

Sam wants to try and say something but instead grasps Dean’s bandage-swathed arm and places it back in Dean’s lap. Sam’s hand briefly circles Dean’s wrist in a loose ring.

She’ll have to redress the hand before going to sleep, Sam reminds herself. She has the kit the nurses gave her. Has the one nurse’s—Bethany? Her name was Bethany—she has Bethany’ cell phone on speed dial. So it’ll be fine.

“You buy any pie on the way here?” Dean interrupts the line of thought. Sam releases her arm with a small start, and she swears Dean almost grins at that.

“No,” Sam rocks back on her heels. “Your digestion’s kind of shit right now with everything they’ve got you on. It’s toast and soup for awhile.”

“Uggh,” Dean grinds out, but she seems too weary and drugged to take it much further than that. Sam reaches out to brush hair from Dean’s eyes and tuck it behind her ear again.

“I got good soup though,” she promises. “Tomato. Mom used to make tomato, right?”

“No good ‘less it’s got rice,” Dean reminds her. Her voice is faint and she remains silent after that. It isn’t until Sam ducks her head to peer into Dean’s face that she realizes her sister has fallen asleep.

Sam cooks the can of soup via the microwave left behind from the previous tenants. She realizes until too late that she has no bowls, not even a mug, and so watches warily as the open can spins off center in the microwave’s yellow light. Sam remembers too many microwave explosions from nights of just her, Dean and whatever canned goods their dad had bought from the last gas station.

She taps a plastic spoon against the off-white counter: a remnant from one fast food stop or another. They’ve long since blended into a stream of drive-throughs and bathrooms that smell like cooking grease.

Now that stream has stopped, suddenly, dumping Sam here in front of a buzzing microwave on a kitchen floor that feels a little gritty under her socks. She could buy a few pots and pans, a box of pasta. Could cook something, like she used to do with Jess. Jess had always been the one to know her way around a kitchen. Her mom was one of those stay-at-home kind who’d roped her children into chopping vegetables and keeping track of the stir-fry. Sam had never voiced how jealous she was that Jess could slice bell pepper with quick, firm strokes that pressed the blade of a Perrier knife against the pad of her thumb.

The microwave beeps and Sam pops the door open to release a smell of tomato soup. She pulls out the can and dips her finger in it to test the temperature, licking off the thick, orange-red liquid with a neat swipe of her tongue.

She wishes she’d remembered rice.

“Dean.” Sam slides into a sit next to her sister and jostles her shoulder. “I have food.” Dean doesn’t stir, and Sam pokes her hard in the face. Dean blurts something that sounds like “fuck you.”

“Food,” Sam repeats, and a final shove sends Dean’s eyes cracking open.

“Hzm,” she tilts her face towards Sam, who wordlessly holds up the can. It takes Dean a moment, but when she recognizes it, she grins stupidly and holds out her good hand. Sam had considered spoon-feeding Dean like she’d been doing in the hospital, but now she hands it over without a fuss.

“You’re awesome,” Dean says fervently, tipping the can to drink from it. Sam lets the spoon rest on the floor beside her and settles more fully against Dean, stretching her long legs across dingy carpet that could use a steam clean. Still, cleaner than most of the motels they’ve seen.

Dean plows her way through the soup—“that hospital shit was gross, Sammy,”—and hiccoughs slightly when she hands the can back to Sam. She’s passed out again as soon as Sam returns from rinsing the can at the sink, and Sam foregoes her plans to shift Dean into one of the empty bedrooms.

Instead, she settles down in front of Dean and starts picking at the bandages to loosen them, like how she practiced that morning under Bethany’s watch.

The bandages closest to the skin come away damp with ointment, revealing skin that, although puffy and angry red, at least looks alive again. It still fascinates Sam in a clinical way how clearing the blood away makes wounds look so benign. How the remains of a hand can look downright reasonable when they’re not pumping red.

Sam spreads fresh antibiotic ointment across stitches holding skin together, across the two stumps that used to be Dean’s thumb and pointer finger.

The fresh bandages go on, medical tape seals the package, and Sam stows the first aid equipment with a second realization at how tired she is. Her eyelids feel like they need to be propped open.

She goes to poke at the pile of supplies she hauled in from the Impala and finds the blankets. She lays two of them out on the carpet. The travel pillow for Dean, a thick, folded sweater for herself, and then Sam slowly shifts a half-asleep Dean from the wall onto the makeshift mattress.

It’s thin and a little cold, but Dean’s too drugged and Sam’s too tired to care as she pries off Dean’s boots. She spreads the biggest blanket on top of Dean.

The last thing Sam does is root through her duffel bag to find her estrogen pills—bought for a good deal from a former pharmacist a few states back. Sam swallows them then dry and mentally hears a faint Dean-sounding voice scolding her that she’s going to wear a hole through her esophagus if she keeps that up. The hypocrite.

Sam sprawls on Dean’s left side, so as not to accidentally crush her sister’s injured hand in her sleep.

For a moment, Sam considers rechecking the salt lines, but her muscles are lead. If Castiel were still around, Sam would have tossed a prayer in her direction, because no matter how often Castiel didn’t answer them, Sam never got the impression that the angel ignored their prayers completely.

But Castiel is, presumably, still stuck in Purgatory and Dean lies besides her with chunks of her right hand missing and as Bobby used to say, you work with what you got.

Sam grunts and buries her face into her pile of sweater.

It takes longer than it should for Sam to fall asleep, considering how damn exhausted she is. She keeps listening to Dean’s breathing.

***

Listen: sleep is a strange place. Ideas leak in there and mix together; fantasies and memories and things thicker than either of those. Easy to get lost.

So. Here’s how this one goes.

***

About twenty miles south of the Missouri-Arkansas border, Sam discovered that his hair tie had somehow slipped off his wrist. The heat wave they’d been battling for the last week made this discovery about ten times worse, as far as Sam was concerned. The Impala’s air conditioner had broken earlier that summer, and these days their dad kept the windows halfway open to try and keep things bearable. He kept saying they’d fix it next time they swung by Bobby’s place, but that was miles and miles away.

“Dean.” Sam leaned across the back seat. “Dean, I need a hair tie.”

“This is the only one I have.” Dean’s shaggy ponytail bobbed as she glanced at Sam with, maybe, some pity. But mostly irritableness, because no one enjoyed driving around the Southeast in the pit of July with broken air conditioning.

“Shit head,” Sam threw out in a fit of damp, muggy frustration, even though Dad had told them more than once that only grownups should say words like that.

“Kids,” their father warned from the front seat, and Dean wrinkled her nose at Sam.

“I’m _sticky_ ,” Sam whined. “I lost my hair tie.”

“Your own fault.” Dean hitched her sneakers up on the seat and placed her hands on scabby knees. Her eleven-year-old shins were dusted with fine hair that glinted gold when the afternoon light caught it.

Sam knew that Dean had already tried to shave that hair off and had cut herself in jagged scours before giving up and making Sam swear not to talk about it. Sam remembered Dean cursing out the tiny cuts, filling the trashcan with tissues spotted with red. They would find out together, two months later, that you needed to make the legs wet and soapy first.

Sam lifted his hair in one damp clump and fanned the back of his neck with his free hand. He wished they still had that little hand-held fan, the one with Bugs Bunny on it. But the cheap foam blades had finally torn, and Dean had long since picked apart its innards in a motel near Sacramento.

 “Use a rubber band,” their dad said, his voice indicating he was trying to be patient.

“Rubber bands hurt when I pull them out,” Sam muttered, then pressed his cheek on the window. He considered the possibility of cutting off all his hair, like people always told him he ought to. He’d probably not have to deal with teasing as much.

Something smacked against Sam’s arm, and he looked down. A worn black hair tie tumbled into his lap. When he looked up, Dean had her face directed at the window, and her hair splayed across her shoulders in dirty blond clumps. Sam hesitated before taking the hair tie and clumsily pulling his hair from his face and neck. It felt instantly better.

“I’ll give it back in an hour,” he tried. He liked making these kinds of sharing rules, even if Dean ignored them half the time and used the elder sibling card instead.

“I don’t care,” Dean shrugged. She turned her head to look at Sam, freckles sharp against her flushed face. “Let’s play ‘Who Am I Thinking Of?’”

“’k,” Sam leaned back. “You can go firs—“ she cuts herself off, attention captured by something in the front seat.

At first she thinks it’s a person. Then she sees the smoke spilling from the car’s vents. It smelled like rotting eggs.

“Demon,” Sam turns to Dean, and suddenly Sam is in her adult body, with legs that press a little too hard against the seat in front of her, and Dean is gone and dad is gone and the smoke has turned into a fire and it rushes around Sam in a wave of someone laughing too hard, laughing too hard—

***

Sam wakes to the sensation of a tight neck and an empty space beside her. She lurches into a sit, blinking at the sunlight that dives through a curtainless window. The sound of someone clattering in the kitchen moves Sam into a stand, and she winces at the way her muscles protest.

“Dean?” She shambles into the kitchen to find her sister standing in front of the oven, watching it with her arms as crossed as she can manage. Sam realizes there’s toast in the oven after glimpsing the open bag of bread on the counter.

“Want to explain?” Dean says without looking up. Sam blinks and scrubs at her face.

“What?”

Dean’s jaw tightens, but it looks like she’s making it a matter of principle not to fully acknowledge Sam.

“I said, want to fucking explain why we’re in an apartment?”

“I—“ Sam feels a little puff of breath leave her in defeat. She’d hoped—but it wasn’t as if she’d been fooling herself. “I just thought it was for the best,” she says. A heartbeat of silence. “It’s not a binding contract. We can leave in a month. A few weeks. People circulate in and out of here all the time—“

“And you couldn’t include me in any of this?” Dean’s face snaps towards her. “Had to go behind my back?”

“Stop dramatizing, I didn’t do anything behind your back.”

“Well I sure as hell never suggested an apartment,” Dean growls. “Never gave any kind of ok for this. Just ‘cause I’m drugged doesn’t—”

“I never—“ Sam pinches the bridge of her nose, just briefly. “Hear me out,” she speaks deliberately. “We can’t do our normal jobs right now. Not for a few months at least. You need…you need to learn how to…” She gestures and feels vaguely horrible. She shouldn’t be having this much trouble acknowledging Dean’s…handicap? Disability? Accident? She doesn’t even have the right word.

Dean looks beyond disgusted, and it sends the pit of Sam’s stomach sinking into her shoes.

Dean pushes herself from the counter with a movement of her hips and reaches out to inch the oven door open. “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

Sam opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again with a small snarl. “And then what?” she demands. “You think you can just waltz back out there and hope you have enough muscle control left to drive? To handle a gun?” She’s pushing Dean into dangerous territory, Sam can tell by the set in her shoulders, but she’s so far beyond caring. “This isn’t something we can brush off and keep going,” Sam hears her voice rising. “We need to stay put for awhile and let you relearn how to use your hand.”

“I don’t have a hand left,” Dean snaps, closing the oven door with a clang. She stares at it with breathe coming out in short gunshots.  

“No, not really,” Sam agrees. “Dean, I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen to us for years. And it sucks that it happened to you, but that’s why we’re going to stick together and—”

“Better me than you,” Dean says in a voice nearly too low to hear. Sam clicks her jaw shut and the kitchen suddenly falls into a fuggy silence. The oven creaks a few times.

“What’s the cost looking like?” Dean asks. Sam doesn’t comprehend for a few seconds.

“The apartment or the medical bill?”

“Both.”

“For the apartment I just used one of our regular identities. I used the Sykes medical insurance card in the hospital,” Sam says. “The one dad set up. Probably’ll hold up for a while.”

Dean opens the oven door again. She stares into it for a long moment, then glances up at Sam. “There’s a reason dad never hung around for the post-operation stuff. Hard to keep siphoning that into a fake name.”

“Dad’s not here anymore,” Sam says. Thank god, she wants to add. It’s bad enough she can still see his demands, his expectations, in every movement his elder daughter is making right now.

“I’m just saying there’s a reason we don’t hang around after a hospital visit,” Dean continues, oddly patient, as she reaches into the oven with her good hand and plucks a slice of toast off the rack. They don’t have anything like butter or jelly, so Dean crunches into it with a distant expression. Sam remains still, unsure where to go next.

“Ok,” Sam says, when the silence stretches too long. “Fine. But I’d rather tackle hospital bills than risk you getting hurt on the road.” She shifts on her feet. “That’s all.”

Dean still doesn’t speak, popping the last bit of toast into her mouth with a contemplative flick of her wrist.

“Credit card fraud won’t go that far. Not far enough to cover an apartment for more than a few months,” she says.

“I know.”

“Just checking.” Dean gestures to the bread. “Want some?” she asks.

“Not hungry.” Pause. “You need to take your pills.”

“Already did,” Dean says, probably with the full knowledge that Sam’s going to check, counting the pills left in the little orange bottles. It’s not worth mentioning now.

“One of the side effects of those pills is motion sickness,” Sam reminds her. “We shouldn’t drive right now.”

Dean’s smile is tight-lipped.

***

Dean slips back into the drugged stupor within an hour, and waves at Sam when she suggests that she should drive to that Wal-Mart and buy a few things.

Sam feels a little on edge leaving Dean so vulnerable, but she resets the salt lines, draws in three devil traps, then adds a slew of other protection sigils that, she hopes, she can go over again in something more permanent.

She wishes again they had Castiel.

On the way to the store, out of too much nervous energy and a need to direct it somewhere, Sam ends up calling the Trans. They’d found Kevin soon after Dean’s return from Purgatory, rescued Mrs. Tran a short while later, and gotten them set up in a safe place with themselves and a few other hunters acting as their guard. It’s not as if Sam can make up for going AWOL when Kevin needed her, but she still feels a need to check up on them now.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice crackles over the phone. Mrs. Tran. Somewhere underground, perhaps.

“Hi,” Sam says as she slows for a red light. “It’s Sam. Just checking on things.”

“We’re fine,” Mrs. Tran says in that clipped voice she gets sometimes. “We just moved our location with Garth. Getting settled in.”

(Mrs. Tran often sounds no-nonsense and clipped. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that she’s tired. But that paranoid part of Sam always brings up the distinct possibility that Mrs. Tran is one of those people who notes the pitch of Sam’s voice, the shape of her jaw, her height, and comes to their conclusions. And they never say anything outright. They just never seem to achieve the same ease of conversation with Sam that they manage with Dean.)

“Good. That’s good to hear.” Sam pinches the bridge of her nose briefly. “Listen, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch lately. Um. Dean got in some trouble and she’s just got out of the hospital yesterday.”

“Is she alright?” Mrs. Tran asks, her voice losing some of its brittleness. Sam considers a few different answers.

She settles on, “She’ll get through it.”

“Do you two need anything?”

Sam laughs a little and sends the Impala forward with the appearance of the green light. “You’re the ones hiding from Crowley. Not us. We can handle ourselves.”

“Well, I don’t see the harm in asking,” Mrs. Tran says. Then, “What’s in that box? No, don’t unpack it yet. Put it in the corner.” The corners of Sam’s mouth curls up a little. “Sorry, Sam,” Mrs. Tran’s voice becomes more clear.

“I’ll let you guys go,” Sam says. “Take care. Call us if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Tran says, and she sounds genuine. Sam pulls the cell phone away from her ear and tosses it into the passenger seat with a putter of her lips.

Sam makes her venture into Wal-Mart quick. Grabs food, an air mattress, a few bowls, cups and spoons, towels, shampoo and soap. Sam feels like she did when she first got into Stanford and had to build up a life’s toolkit out of what was on sale at Wal-Mart and Target. And it’s sort of the same, isn’t it? Coming to such a complete halt after years on the road. Scrambling for the basic things that everyone else had already built up from years of living in the same place.

Clutter, Dean would have called it.

Dean is predictably passed out when Sam returns, and Sam is grateful for it. She has a shade too many plastic bags, and she doesn’t want to tip this tenuous truce they have in the wrong direction. Dean’s stubborn, but she’s far from stupid. She’ll come around to the fact that they need to catch their breathes for a bit.

At least, Sam hopes so. Sort of counting on it.

She’s in the middle of putting away the cans of soup and wishing she’d thought to grab some shelf liner when there’s a hard scrabble from the living room. Sam drops a can with a thump and lurches into the living room in time to see Dean disappear into the bathroom, followed by a wet splatter. Sam takes a moment, roots through the bags until she finds a water bottle and paper towels, and edges towards the bathroom.

She finds Dean with her left forearm braced across the toilet bowl, her forehead against the arm. Sam’s relieved to see that she managed to get most of the bile into the toilet.

“Hey.” Sam moves into a crouch at the bathroom’s entrance, like she’s dealing with a frightened stray, and unscrews the water bottle. She holds it out as a peace offering. Dean makes a deep _hurk_ and the bathroom echoes emptily with the sound of vomit hitting toilet water.

When she’s done, Dean holds out one shaking hand, and Sam places the water bottle in it. She watches her sister take a swig then spit into the toilet. She does it three times before she allows herself to swallow. Sam sees a sheen of sweat on Dean’s brow.

Dean places the half-empty water bottle on the ground beside her and rests her forehead back on her arm, taking deep, wet breathes. Sam moves to her knees, then shuffles forward enough to place her hand on the back of Dean’s neck. She begins to knead at the muscles taut as piano wires beneath Dean’s skin. Dean releases a general groan of misery and tips towards Sam.

“Lemme flush,” Sam suggests. Dean leans away from the toilet, her left hand coming up to hook onto Sam’s arm like a safety bar. Sam leans past her to reach the lever, glancing in the toilet automatically to check for blood.

But it looks like the standard fare, so Sam presses the lever and leans back with Dean, in case this is one of those toilets that splatter things when it flushes. The overwhelming scent of bile diminishes, though doesn’t disappear completely.

“Why’d you hafta get an empty apartment?” Dean asks fuzzily. “This floor is crap to sleep on.”

“Bought an air mattress.” Sam begins kneading Dean’s neck again, and they fall into mutual silence. Dean’s fingers still dig into Sam’s arm.

“You think you’re going to hurl again?” Sam asks after a moment. Dean shakes her head wordlessly. “Ok,” Sam moves her hand from Dean’s neck to her upper back. “Let me get the mattress set up, and we’ll let you lay down, right? I’ll get you some more soup. That sound good?”

“’m not six, Sammy,” Dean mutters. “Don’t hafta treat me like…gonna break.” Sam thinks for a moment.

“I want to be gentle with you right now,” she says in a firm voice. “You don’t have a choice.”

 _It’s not like the world’s treated you like a porcelain doll. I sure as hell haven’t._ She wants to say that. She doesn’t.

“Kinky.” Dean forces a grin and cracks an eye open to squint it at Sam. Sam rolls her eyes.

“Wait here,” she stands. “Try and aim for the toilet if you have to throw up again.”

“Rrrroger,” Dean burbles, left hand coming up to massage at her bandaged hand. Sam watches the motion for a moment, at the way Dean’s fingers play over the space where her pointer and thumb ought to be, then turns away.

It takes some work, but after only about twenty minutes, Sam has the air mattress inflated in the empty living room and Dean installed in it. Dean’s reaching the point where the drugs are beginning to let up, and she can bitch without slurring.

“I’d really, really prefer a motel at this point,” she shouts at Sam, who’s warming up soup for herself. “That would have a TV at least. Or internet.”

“I can piggyback on our neighbor’s,” Sam calls back, eyes still glued to the microwave. It cheers her up in odd ways that she has a bowl spinning in there instead of an open can.

The silence is long enough that Sam assumes Dean has dozed off again, or is mulling at the ceiling. Then:

“Y’can’t fool me, by the way,” Dean says. “I know exactly why you went for the apartment schtick.”

“Why’s that?” Sam pops the microwave open, grabs a spoon, and wanders into the living room where Dean’s bent legs form a tent out of the blanket Sam draped over her. Her hands rest on her stomach, her left hand absently rubbing at the right again. She turns when Sam settles against the wall near Dean’s head and stirs at her bowl of soup to cool it down.

“That smells disgusting,” Dean says.

“Broccoli cheddar.”

“Yeah. Disgusting,” Dean confirms. She watches Sam take a cautious sip. “Just because my hand’s busted doesn’t mean you can grab at a normal life again.”

“What?”

“I saw you having way too much fun with that kitchen. And I didn’t forget that we’re in, like, College Town U.S.A. Where is this again?” Sam’s spoon stops halfway to her mouth, and she lets it drift back to the bowl.

“Champaign. Illinois. So you’re implying I somehow planned for you to get your hand chewed off here?” she asks. Dean scowls.

“I’m saying if we were somewhere normal, you’d have gotten a motel room,” she says. “Maybe if you hadn’t just finished living the dream with that Amelia chick.”

Sam eats another spoonful of soup to avoid giving Dean the finger.

“Look, it’s exactly what I said before,” Sam says. “We need to stay put for awhile and at some point it’s easier to do the apartment than a motel room.”

“Bullshit,” Dean says. “We’re not even the ones paying for it.” This goes directly against to the spirit of her concerns that morning about using fraudulent credit cards to pay for the place, but Sam knows to pick her battles.

“Doesn’t mean we should burn through our resources,” Sam raises her eyebrows. “And this isn’t a big town, Dean. There aren’t that many options. ‘Sides, this whole area is set up for cheap student housing and won’t ask too many questions.”

Dean keeps playing at her bandages, her eyes hard.

“We’re not staying longer than a week,” Dean finally says, and turns over to yank blankets over her shoulder.

Sam feels something in her gut relax. She has a week now. Better than this morning.

***

They move awkwardly through the next few days. Sam, true to her word, wriggles her way onto their neighbor’s Wi-Fi, so Dean has that at least to keep her occupied. Sam wishes she could provide more.

She’s caught Dean staring at her bandaged hand too many times, yet Dean never seems able to focus on the bare skin when Sam redresses it. Sam thinks that with the bandages, Dean can still pretend that she has nothing worse than a broken arm or sprained wrist. Something briefly inconvenient, something workable as soon as the cast or splint comes off. But this time, when the bandages are permanently removed, Dean’s going to be left with something alien to her. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sam’s been the one perusing forums, asking people how they work with a disabled hand. Sam’s pretty sure Dean keeps to porn and illegally downloaded movies. It’s like the beginning of that goddamn year when Dean’s soul was careening towards hell, she laughing her head off and Sam making herself sick with worry and trying not to show it. Only this time they don’t have a Castiel to swoop in and raise anyone from anything.

And then there’s that, the unspoken, awkward sense of _if only Castiel._ If only Castiel were here, she could form a new hand for Dean between one breath and the next. If only Dean didn’t miss her and never admit it, maybe she wouldn’t have been so reckless in the first place. If only Castiel had escaped Purgatory with Dean and Benny. If only Castiel hadn’t ended up opening up a portal for the Leviathan in her nuclear arms race with Raphael…well, you could go on for a while.

Sam has no idea if prayers can snake their way into monster heaven, doesn’t think they can, but it’s not as if she doesn’t sent her fair share.

The prayers are half “I’m thinking of you and I’m hoping to anything like a God that you’re still alive,” half “damn it, we need you here. Dean’s tearing herself up inside and she won’t let me see it, and I miss you like hell so please stay alive and find your way back to us.”

Sam can’t even pretend that a constant existence of escaping Leviathan is going to be improved by a few mumbled prayers from Dean Winchester’s demon-blooded little sister. But she does it anyway. Just in case.

***

“Mom used to tell us angels were watching over us,” Dean whispered. Sam pulled his face from Dean’s chest just enough to peer up at her through the gloom.

“Are they?”

Sam could feel Dean hesitate.

“Yeah, Sammy,” she said.

Muffled shouts from downstairs made Sam tense and Dean fall silent.

“The kid has a hundred degree temperature, John!” Bobby’s voice drifted up to them, above the low murmur of fire waiting just outside the door. “Where the hell were you for that?”

“Killing the goddamn wendigo _you_ sent me after!” their father’s voice returned. “It was worth the extra two nights. People are safe, now, Bobby. I’m not apologizing for that.”

Something thudded.

“You should have let me send someone else to take over, idjit,” Bobby replied. “You can’t have thought it was a good idea to let an eight-year-old take care of that.”

Dean shifted suddenly then disengaged herself from Sam. Sam watched his sister pad across the guest bedroom and shut the door with a firm click. The voices receded into dim thunder. The crackle of fire continued.

“’m thirsty,” Sam said, and Dean silently let him sip from the cup of water Bobby had left on the bedside table. It felt good on his dry throat, and Sam felt incrementally better when Dean slipped back into bed beside him.

His sister had a new stiffness to her, though, and Sam wished it would go away.

“Tell me ‘bout Mom,” he said. Dean shifted, considering.

“You know everything,” she said.

“No. Tell me again.”

Dean turned her head so they could see each other’s faces in the flickering, sickly light coming through the door crack. Dean rolled in her lips, tapping the musty pillow before speaking.

“Dad loved her a lot,” she said. “Her name was Mary.”

“She liked to sing,” Sam supplied, because he knew this part by heart and liked tasting the words in his mouth. “She used to sing Beatles songs.”

Dean scowled. “I’m telling the story,” she said. Sam didn’t feel bad; Dean had gotten the real thing. Sam thought it only fair he should be able to own a little piece of the mother he didn’t remember.

“She was really smart,” Dean continued, “because she always knew when I was lying. And she built your crib when Dad was at work to surprise him. I helped.”

“She baked cookies and things.”

“She baked a lot. And she called you bugbear.” Sam giggled, because he still thought it was a ridiculous name.

“And sometimes, she and Dad danced in the kitchen. I don’t think I was supposed to see that, but I did.” Dean fell silent briefly. “She made really good sandwiches. Grilled cheese.”

“I want grilled cheese,” Sam said.

“Let Bobby and Dad finish fighting,” Dean insisted, and Sam relinquished. Dean always knew better when it came to the grownups.

“Is Mom an angel now?” Sam asked.

Dean shifted under the covers.

“Yeah.”

“So she’s watching over us?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” Sam felt at peace with things then, even with his fever and the fighting noises downstairs. Having a mom for an angel no doubt made things easier. He could all but feel her presence hovering over him, and it’s so real feeling that for a moment Sam looks up in case there’s an angel standing over her bed.

There isn’t.

Suddenly feeling droopy, Sam wriggled closer to Dean until his sister sighed and looped her arms around Sam, tugging him close.

Sam was drifting closer and closer into sleep, his nose snubbed against Dean’s chest, when a particularly loud shout from Dad tugged him back into wakefulness and—

Fire licking across the bed. Sam was screaming so shrill and so loud and she didn’t understand where all of it had come from. Dean must have been dead because the bed was drowned in flames and it somehow made Sam freeze to the bone and Lucifer was somewhere out there, she didn’t know where—

***

“Sammy.” The voice comes sharp and hissed, accompanied by a hard jostle. Sam wakes up with a hard gasp. She brings her hands up to search the darkness in front of her, expecting to find charred remains of a stubborn eight-year-old girl.

“Sammy,” the voice comes again. Something soft and fabric-like runs across her forehead, and it takes Sam a moment to recognize it as a bandaged hand. It does its best to push Sam’s hair from her face.

“Hey.” Dean shifts closer, so her breath collides with Sam’s forehead. Sam peels her eyes open and finds Dean’s eyes lit up by a bar of orange light poking through the window. It picks out the crow’s feet Dean’s acquired over the years and that Sam has always liked, though she’d never voice as much. Sam focuses on them now and feels her breath run through her in heavy gusts.

“Nightmare,” she croaks.

“Yeah, dude, I got that.” The edges of Dean’s eyes relax. “Wanna talk?”

“Mm.” Sam turns her face into the pillow, and Dean accepts it as a signal to toss her arm over Sam’s shoulder and tug her closer. Sam tucks her face into Dean’s neck, brazen in the stiff darkness of the empty apartment, and feels her breath dampen the skin there.

Dean vibrates with speech, and Sam thinks she says, “Wish you’d stopped growing in middle school, Sasquatch,” but she’s already tilting into unconsciousness, and is only really aware of the stump of fabric running up and down the back of her sweating neck.

***

Sam surfs the local news websites the next morning with a box of Cheerios nested in the blankets beside her. She researches mainly out of habit, partially out the sense that if there _is_ anything supernatural causing trouble locally, she’s more or less duty bound to take care of it.

Dean sleeps in a sprawl next to her, dishwater blond hair tossed in a spider web across her pillow. Sam doesn’t have the heart to wake her, and it’s not as if they have anything to do that day, so she lets the clock in the upper right corner of her screen move from nine to ten and then ten to eleven.

Around 11:15 a.m., Dean finally shifts under the blankets and squints up at Sam leaning against the wall with the laptop balance on top of her bent knees.

“No jogging this morning?” Dean asks after a few seconds of rubbing at her eyes. Sam pretends not to notice that she begins moving her right arm, stops, then uses her left hand.

“Eh.” Sam closes out of an article detailing funding for the local school board. “Not obligated to do it every morning.”

“Coulda fooled me.” Dean shifts herself onto her elbows and winces. “Got anything for breakfast?”

Sam shakes the box of Cheerios and laughs when Dean wrinkles her nose.

“C’mon, you’ve got to negate what those triple bacon cheeseburgers have been doing to your arteries.” She shoves the box in Dean’s face, causing her sister to yelp and bury her face in her pillow.

“Health nut, get that crap outta here,” her voice comes muffled. “It tastes like cardboard.”

“You’ve never eaten flaxseed cereals,” Sam counters. “Jess used to buy that stuff all the time. Cheerios are candy in comparison.”

“So should I be blaming her for the salads and jogging too?” Dean peers out from her pillow, once she’s sure Sam has stowed the Cheerios back to her side of the mattress.

“I dunno. Maybe.” Sam reopens the internet and checks her email again. She feels Dean sigh deeply and stretch beneath the blankets.

“It’s a good thing you’re the research person,” Dean says after a few minutes of silence, save the clicking of Sam’s keyboard.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. It’s gonna be a bitch relearning how to type.” Sam doesn’t realize her fingers have stopped until the quiet is interrupted by someone slamming their door shut in the parking lot. She looks down at Dean, who’s staring up at the ceiling with her hands across her stomach.

“Writing too,” Dean continues, her voice distant. “I really hate that it had to be my right hand. My handwriting’s going to become impossible. And it’s all the basic things, you know? I can already tell it’s going to be annoying, like wiping myself or putting in tampons. I never realized how weird it is to put in a tampon with my left hand.”

She shifts her head slightly and looks up at Sam.

“Driving should still be all right.” Dean’s all but whispering now. Her eyes harden. “Fuck it all if I can’t drive Baby anymore.”

Sam feels something give way in the middle of her chest, and—to hell with it—roughly tousles her sister’s bed hair.

“Hey!” Dean squawks. “What’s that for?”

“You,” Sam snaps her laptop shut and rolls off the mattress, just to avoid whatever side eye Dean might be giving her. “I’m showering. Take your pills and I’ll redress your hand when I’m done.”

“Yeah Nurse Betty,” Dean drawls, tugging the laptop to her. “You’re crap at morning-after pillow talk.”

Sam barks a laugh at that before disappearing into the bathroom.

***

They’re perched on either side of a bucket of chicken from KFC that evening when Sam decides conditions are as ideal as she can make them.

“We need to refill your prescriptions tomorrow,” she says, picking through the bucket for another drumstick.

“Don’t bother,” Dean says around a too-large mouthful of meat, and honestly, it’s as if she never matured past the age of five sometimes. “We know tons of people who can get ‘em cheaper. That kid up in Wisconsin, straight from Canada, yeah? He got you your estrogen pills that one time.”

Sam decides Dean must have nabbed the last drumstick and settles for a wing.

“I was thinking before we light out of here though.” She keeps her eyes on the breaded crust as she tears it from the meat. “We may as well show up at your appointment tomorrow. I can refill at the pharmacy there and we can make sure everything’s stable.” She glances up casually to find Dean with an elbow perched on each thigh. She can see the defiance lighting in those green eyes. Irritation surges through her. “Because, you know, I’d prefer knowing there’s an infection while in a hospital, instead of fifty miles from the nearest town with you running a fever.”

Dean’s expression descends to one of annoyance.

“That happened once,” she says, tearing into what Sam is certain is her rightful drumstick. “I was 16 or something.”

“Try 22,” Sam suggests. She keeps staring, and Dean eventually stops chewing and swallows. Her face oscillates for a moment.

“Yeah okay.” Dean sets the drumstick on a folded paper towel and wipes her left hand on the carpet, just to piss Sam off. She juts her chin towards the kitchen. “It’s going to be annoying to carry all the crap you bought.”

“Useful crap,” Sam shrugs, her temper cooling as easily as it sprang up. “Air mattresses are better than plenty of the beds we’ve slept on. I’m keeping it.”

“Gettin’ soft, Sammy.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve stopped feeling bad about being comfortable once in a while,” Sam replies. She doesn’t realize it sounds like a challenge until she hears herself, and after a split second, she backs it up with a pointed look at her sister. Dean looks like she has a few words she could say on that, most of them involving Amelia and maybe Purgatory, but instead she uncurls into a stand and moves into the kitchen to refill her cup with water.

***

In the waiting room the next morning, Dean shifts in her plastic seat, practically disappearing inside her baggy raincoat, and watches the window that opens into the hospital’s main hall. Moms with saggy-clothed kids in tow pass by, seniors in pairs or trios, nurses and doctors navigating the human traffic with distracted grace.

“You allergic to any medications besides neomycin?” Sam asks, the cheap ballpoint pen hovering above the check-in form. “There was that Vicodin that gave you rashes in Florida.”

“What a horse doctor stationed above a porn shop told us was Vicodin.” Dean glances at her for once then skitters off to follow two medical students with their heads together in conversation. “Not even going to guess what it really was.” She pauses. “I had no idea maroon scrubs can make a guy’s ass look that good.”

“Right,” Sam gets the sudden urge to giggle, and instead moves on to the next section. “Past traumatic injury,” it reads. That really makes her want to laugh. Not in the relieved, at-least-Dean-sounds-like-Dean way. More the way she used to laugh in donkey brays as a teenager whenever she got confused in a social situation.

Sam picks the years between Dean’s return from Hell and trip into Purgatory, and start ticking boxes.

If Castiel were here, Sam thinks suddenly, she’d probably be listing every stubbed toe in that steady, serious voice of hers. Dean wouldn’t be fidgeting or checking out medical students’ asses with a touch too much bravado. She’d be focused on Cas, explaining the American medical system in half truth, half bullshit. Sam would listen and pipe up at the _really_ bullshitted parts, and Castiel would look between them with that expression that Sam always interpreted as, “I’ve been an Angel of the Lord since the beginning of time, but I’m going to let you two treat me like a child since I like you enough.”

Sam still wonders when Castiel decided on that.

She finishes up the form with a flourished signature from Barbara Sykes and taps Dean’s shoulder with the clipboard as she stands.

“Handing this in,” she waves the clipboard, and Dean nods once before looking back out the window with a little twitch of her left hand across her right. Sam wonders how long she’d been rubbing at it.

The nurse behind the window smiles and assures Sam that they’ll be called in soon, and Sam ambles back to Dean as if to catch her sister while she’s still unaware of her. Dean’s still scrambling around the space of her missing fingers. Sam swipes a TIME magazine and flips it open as she sits beside Dean. She manages to read a few short opinion pieces before the fumbling in the corner of her eye gets to be too much.

“You have ghost sensation?” she asks in a quiet voice. Dean looks at her, her nylon rain jacket shifting around her.

“What?”

“When people lose limbs. They can still feel them. Or something like them.” Sam crinkles the magazine slightly. Dean looks down at her right hand’s new shape: lopsided and in an eternal expression of “three.” Three blind mice. Three little pigs. Three more minutes. (You’ve had the Game Boy forever, Dean.) Three more cookies. (No, Sammy, we need to save them.) Three Winchesters in an old black car driving forever.

“Sometimes,” Dean says, and Sam focuses on her again. “It’s common though; that hunter we met down in New Mexico, she still felt her leg all the time, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.” Sam lets Dean get away with the veer in conversation, and instead calls up her memory of, essentially, a female version of Bobby. She’d been surrounded by miles of half-desert and had crocheted doilies on top of her TV. Damn good shot.

“It’s no big,” Dean offers, as if afraid _she’s_ hurt _Sam_ somehow, and it’s so Dean that Sam wants to throw an arm across her tight shoulders and say something spectacularly witty and comforting all at once.

All Sam can think of is _Sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. I’ve read it’s maddening to feel the limbs you’re missing. Why did I just bring it up?_

“Sykes?” Sam looks up with Dean, and Sam’s sure that if she looked over, she’d find relief.

“Want me to—“

“Get that prescription filled,” Dean waves her hand as she stands. “Sooner we get out of here the better.”

Sam doesn’t provide any counterargument for that. She doesn’t quite have the chutzpa. She watches her sister follow a nurse through the door then leverages herself to a stand and ambles from the waiting room toward the small pharmacy she used last time.

The hospital is bright and well designed as far as hospitals go, and Sam moves past patients and doctors and nurses with a settling sense that, if she could convince Dean to stay here, it’d be a good place to heal. Sam likes the doctor who treated Dean, likes the nurses especially, likes the town surrounding it. And yeah, she likes the university’s presence, likes the flux of young faces and obsession with college sports that it brings. Sam’s always had the notion that if she settles anywhere, she’d want to find a cute college town like this. Amelia had grown up in one, and she’d agreed with her. Sam blinks, hard, and veers into the pharmacy behind an elderly couple wheeling oxygen tanks.

The line moves swiftly enough, and soon Sam’s gripping three stapled bags that rattle against her thigh as she heads back to meet Dean.

She’s just turned the corner when a cohesive blur of colors makes her twitch her head to the right. Sam’s heart leaps to the back of her mouth, and she stops almost cartoonishly, scanning the mild trickle of people for the tan overcoat and blue scarf and messy dark hair.

But no. The overcoat is still in Purgatory, on Castiel’s thin shoulders. Sam curls in her shoulders slightly and keeps moving. She wonders if this happens to Dean. The idea makes her roll her lips in, scrub at her face.

 _Cas, I just thought I saw you. I hope you’re still holding on._ Sam hesitates. _We’re in Champaign, Illinois. We may be moving soon. But we’re in Champaign, Illinois. 324 Walnut Boulevard. #13. In case you didn’t hear last time. That’s the apartment I rented. Dean’s not happy about it, but who’s surprised?_

Fucking hell.

Sam wants to slug someone, namely herself, once she reaches the waiting room again. Sending addresses to angels stuck in Purgatory. Great coping mechanism right there.

_If you were here she’d stay. You would be able to convince her, even if she’d act like it was her idea._

She tosses herself into a chair, crosses her arms, and stares at the cream color of the far wall for the next ten minutes until Dean emerges. She can feel the frustration radiating from her.

“What happened?” Dean stops a few paces away. Sam keeps her head down so she can only see the scuffed boots she persuaded (forced) Dean to buy after her last pair grew holes, and the jeans that still have a splatter of blood from a vampire hunt in Chattanooga. Sam remembers Dean hemming those jeans by hand.

“What?” Sam parrots, and by the time she lifts her face enough to meet Dean’s she’s reset it to something vaguely bored. “You done?”

“Yeah,” Dean looks over Sam again, so Sam stands and rattles the prescription bags.

“The doctor didn’t change your prescription, did he? He told us it’d be good for two weeks.”

“Didn’t even see the guy,” Dean shrugs, falling into step beside Sam as they approach the window. Sam hands across Barbara Sykes’ insurance card. “Just nurses checking everything’s still kosher.” She nudges Sam’s side like an apology. “They said the bandaging looks professional.”

“Damn straight,” Sam says, finishing the transaction. “I’m a _fantastic_ nurse.” They amble toward the door together, Sam stowing away the stolen insurance card with a flicker of guilt. The bill hadn’t been cheap.

“You’d be better if you dressed up in one of those World War II nurse outfits,” Dean says, and Sam doesn’t even hesitate to elbow her in the ribs.

“Don’t objectify me,” she says, and the corners of Dean’s mouth flicker into a hesitant grin.

They reach the Impala and swing in, Dean humming Metallica under her breath. Sam starts the engine, pulls from the parking spot, then blurts, “Let’s leave now.”

“What?”

“Let’s head out now. We were going to leave today or tomorrow, weren’t we?” She slows the car to allow a couple to cross the parking lot and tries to ignore the heat of Dean’s stare.

“I figured you were going to spring a list of arguments for hanging around here,” she says.

“I’m not.” Sam lurches the car slightly as they move forward again. “I don’t. Let’s swing past the apartment and leave.”

“Sam.” Dean’s hand is rough, and she maybe-accidentally pinches Sam’s arm when she grabs at her sleeve. “Tell me what.”

Sam jerks her arm away. “Maybe I don’t feel like fighting you on two fronts,” she pounds out, accenting it with a thump on the gas pedal.

“ _Jesus_ , Sam, you crash, I’m going to cut your hand off too!” Dean’s voice has become guttural. “I’ll shred the left one, we can be a matching set.”

“Stop using smartass comments to dismiss what happened!” Sam roars back, and she’s not even aware at how loud it comes out until she feels the steering wheel vibrate under her hands. She peels into the road and almost wants to crash on purpose, just to ratchet Dean up.

“ _Okay_ ,” Dean has her hands out like she’s dealing with an angry dog. “Sam, pull over, I refuse to die in a fucking car crash.”

“I’m fine,” Sam says, and eases from the gas pedal. Dean watches her as they bump along for a long minute. Her hands drift back to her lap.

“What two fronts?”

Sam sighs like an annoyed teenager. “Fighting you about being careful with your hand is already going to be hell, because you’re a stubborn jackass, Dean Winchester,” she says. “Dunno why I thought I should make you stay here and create more stress for myself.”

The silence she hears from her right isn’t brooding or annoyed. It’s flat. Stony. Blank. That confuses Sam beneath the boiling surface of her temper.

They don’t speak for the next five minutes while Sam gets mixed up by street signs and ends up doing a 360 in an IHOP parking lot. When they pull up to the apartment, Sam finally chances a glance at her sister. She finds only the back of her head, shaggy dishwater hair folded into the hood of her rain jacket. Sam’s not sure why she wore that today. It’s barely cloudy.

“You can stay here, it’ll take me fifteen minutes to get everything together,” she says.

“Yeah,” Dean looks forward, and Sam has to resist leaning to try and get a better look at her face. “Okay.”

Sam imagines the alternate reality where she doesn’t lose her temper, where Dean says wryly that she still has one good hand, may as well put it to good use. Sam’s not sure which version is worse.

It takes less than ten minutes to dump everything in the Wal-Mart bags, and Sam feels a harsh satisfaction when the ceramic bowls clatter against one another, followed by the coffee mug. She hopes they chip.

She’s in the middle of thrusting clothes into their duffel when something, a pigeon maybe, passes near enough for the sound of shifting feathers.

Her hands slacken.

After several moments, a sigh moves through Sam in three hitched inhales, one gusting exhale. She continues placing clothes in the duffel, but more slowly. She takes time to fold a few of the shirts she knows Dean likes.

After that, Sam moves to the Wal-Mart bags and finds the one with all the soups and canned vegetables. She brings it to the kitchen, checks that all the expiration dates won’t come for a few years, and replaces them in the cabinet above the sink.

She moves on to pile the air mattress, pillow and two blankets in the corner, easily visible. The bowls return to their previous space, as do the utensils and cups. She even leaves behind the body soap and bottle of shampoo she’d gotten as a treat for herself.

It takes two trips to haul everything that’s left into the car. When she’s done, Sam jogs up to the apartment for a third time with a roll of duct tape, still not looking at Dean, who’s pretended to fall asleep against the window.

The first apartment key Sam tucks into her pocket. She’ll move it to her wallet later on. The second, after some deliberation, she tapes on the little shelf formed by the top of the doorframe. She spends a few moments wondering if it’s too high for someone other than herself, then decides that it’s manageable on tiptoes.

Sam steps back, the duct tape hanging from her wrist, and looks out at the Impala again. She bows her head automatically when she begins speaking.

“Hey Cas,” she says, her voice low. “Wanted to give you an update. We’re leaving. Not sure where’s next, but I’ll try to let you know. I…that apartment? I’m keeping it. Just in case. But I wanted to let you know…if you come back and you can’t teleport or something. It’s 324 Walnut Boulevard #13. Get someone to drive you here. The key’s on top of the door. There’s enough supplies for a few weeks. And…if you can get in touch with us, we’ll come. We’ll come straight away, alright?” Sam huffs a laugh. “Dean would flip.” She doesn’t expand on that line of thought, just stands there and wonders abruptly if she should cross herself. Jess had been Catholic. She did it when they went to church together.

Sam moves her hand across her forehead and chest quickly, then goes back to the Impala.

***

This one started in fire and moved backwards from there.

Sam sat on top of a grassy hill, yellowing from summer. She had her twelve-year-old body, beginning to edge away from cute, further into gawky. She hadn’t hit her real growth spurt yet; that wouldn’t be for another year.

She felt the awkward itchiness of the training bra beneath her shirt—one of Dean’s old ones—riding beneath the flat expanse of her chest. Dean had told her that she ought to spare herself bras in summer if she didn’t really need them. Sam had explained haltingly that it was what she wanted because all the other girls at school were wearing bras by now and getting periods, and Sam couldn’t have the latter but she could still do the former. Dean gave in with a vague shrug and an assurance that no, dad wouldn’t hear about this.

Sam stood and crossed her arms, looking down the yellow-grassed slope. A fire raced toward her in a roaring wall, and Sam knew if she looked beyond it, she’d find Michael and Lucifer locked in one of their battles. The fire was always just a side effect.

She wondered where Adam was.

“Sam.” Sam turned and found his dad standing in Bobby’s yard, a 9mm in his hand. Dean perched on a pile of cinderblocks a few paces beyond. She was 16 at this point. Confident and young and beautiful, and Sam would be lying if he claimed he didn’t look at his sister with a burning reverence.

He stepped toward them in floating bounces. The fire singed his clothes and hair behind him.

“Show me what you can do, hey?” John was smiling. Sam remembered this: four days spent with Bobby while dad and Dean had gone after a witch coven a state over. Sam hadn’t managed to mind being left behind.

Sam shifted to a few days before this scene in a foggy, dreamlike swoop. She sat at Bobby’s creaking kitchen table and chewed through a mouthful of peanut butter and honey sandwich.

“You enjoying reading that?” Bobby sat across from her, not eating, just keeping her company. He nodded at a dog-eared copy of _David Copperfield_ sitting at her elbow _._ Sam nodded back.

“I wanted to read Dickens,” she said, and felt the pride burst in the pit of her stomach at being able to say that. Dean called Sam a massive nerd when she’d extracted it from a library book sale in Genoa, Nevada. Sam didn’t tell her that she got it partially to get at dad. To say: you can’t tell me what to read. I can waste my time in fictional characters instead of researching who died when. Watch me.

Sam wondered if Bobby knew that as he pulled the book across the table and flipped it open to the first page. But Bobby played his cards close to his chest, always had, and Sam could only watch his eyes skim the first few lines.

“I like Dickens,” Bobby supplied. “He didn’t do quite as much shittin’ around as other writers of that time.”

Sam giggled abruptly, and Bobby raised his eyebrows at her.

“Don’t give me that, Sam, I’m a drunk old man, but I’m not stupid.”

“’Course not,” Sam was surprised into silence. That hadn’t been what she’d been thinking at all. She was thinking that Bobby and Dean were so alike that way, letting people stick them in boxes labeled “crazy old drunk” or “rebellious, hot teenager” and then having Dickens or Vonnegut hiding in their back pockets.

Which was why Sam didn’t take Dean too seriously about the nerd thing. She’d finish _David Copperfield_ eventually, and then Dean would start curling up with it on nights that their dad was out, or would pick it up distractedly when he was present.

She wanted to explain this to Bobby, but she suspected he already knew. Sam still half-believed that Bobby knew everything.

Something roared at the windows and Sam turned to look before he plunked himself back in the yard with dad and Dean. Dean had on a green shirt that showed off her cleavage, and Sam wondered if she’d snuck out to a bar the night before and had never bothered changing out. The sharp jealousy in his gut had to be pointedly ignored.

“You were practicing?” his dad asked, and Sam turned to him to find something light in his face. A good hunt. Sam didn’t want to ruin that. So he nodded, accepted the 9mm, and neatly blasted three cans from their place. It was easy, automatic as breathing, and Sam hated it.

“Nice job, bugbear,” dad said, and reached over to wrap Sam in a one-armed hug. This was a surprise, and Sam froze. He lifted his eyes and met Dean’s gaze, saw the way his sister had leaned forward suddenly. He relaxed into his father’s hug. Dean leaned back again.

A whiskery kiss to the temple and then his dad rubbed his back once before telling them to be ready to go in about an hour. He needed to cover a few bases with Bobby. Dean and Sam watched him leave in long strides, carrying away the scent of hotel shampoo and gunpowder and motor oil.

A woman might be standing a little ways away, and her blue eyes might follow John Winchester’s progress, but Sam can’t be sure, and in any case, “He’s drunk,” Sam said.

“Buzzed,” Dean shot her a look, voice mediating. Sam resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

(If Sam weren’t in the way, if hunting weren’t in the way, Dean would be a classic Daddy’s Little Girl. Sam knew that, but had no idea if Dean knew. In this universe, she was Dad’s right hand, the soldier, the eldest child. No time for being a little girl, better to invest that energy building herself into a version of the son she should have been.)

“What?” Dean laughed. “Can’t the old man celebrate ganking some witches?” Sam opened her mouth to speak, hitched in breathlessness, because the fire had just now caught up with her and lapped across her back in a low thud—

***

“Here, I’m guessing it’s our kind of job.”

Sam grunts and twists around. A newspaper slides off her back and onto the mattress. Dean stands at the foot of her bed, Styrofoam cup in her good hand, eyebrows hitched in Sam’s direction.

As Dean moves away, Sam nabs the paper and finds Dean’s job on the second page, beneath a larger story on the opening of a new grocery store.

“Three disappearances in the last month?” Sam echoes the first line.

“All boys between the ages of 19 and 25, all in the same subdivision,” Dean supplies. She’s perched on the other bed, eyes on the Today show playing on the dinky TV, body still tuned towards Sam.

Sam takes a few seconds to smooth her eyes across Dean’s edges. The dark-wash jeans they picked up from an outlet store in Washington, the blue button-up that’s been floating between them since forever, the cup of coffee, the bandaged hand still counting to three, the hair pulled into a loose ponytail, held with one of the black hair ties that are perpetually disappearing into the ether.  Besides the right hand, Dean’s outline is as easy to package in Sam’s brain as the mould of the Impala’s passenger seat or the mechanics of a shotgun. Sam tries to let her shoulders relax.

“Did you take your meds this morning?”

Dean tilts her head. “The antibiotics,” she says. “Not the pain meds. I’m useless on those. Took Tylenol though.”

 _Doesn’t it hurt?_ Sam wants to ask, but she knows that such a question will pull John’s eldest daughter into the open like an angry grizzly.

“Okay.” She looks back down at the paper. “So you want to check this out?”

Dean sips from her coffee and rolls in her lips briefly. “Closest thing that sounds like us.”

Sam waits a heartbeat longer, then folds the newspaper up with a crackle and swings her long legs off the edge of the bed.

“Gimme ten minutes,” she says.

***

They pull up outside a whitewash house with a rusting porch later that afternoon. It sits in the midst of a subdivision with old cars, thin lawns, and scads of flowers. Sam remembers these kinds of neighborhoods, remembers living in a spare room for a week, or renting the entire house for a semester so she and Dean could stay in one school for longer than a month.

“Rodrigo Barriola?” Dean flips a few pages of the file they acquired at the police department. She uses the exposed fingers of her damaged hand, almost as if she’s practicing.

She pauses, and Sam leans over to scrutinize the small photo paper-clipped to the report. A young man, maybe eighteen, grins from beneath a mop of curling, dark hair.

“Disappeared,” Sam confirms. “As far as his family can tell, he snuck out of the house two nights ago and never came back.” She eyes the boy’s smile again and wonders who picked out this picture to hand to the police.

She flicks her eyes over to find Dean pressing at her bandaged hand. “You sure you’re alright without the pain meds?”

Dean gives her a single flat look, and Sam rolls her eyes, hands open in surrender. Dean flips the file closed and snaps the passenger door open. “You’re doing the questioning on this one.”

“Sure?” Sam poses the word as a question, slipping out from behind the steering wheel.

“This makes me look, like, _dangerous_ ,” Dean explains, waving her maimed hand as if they haven’t, literally, just been discussing it. A grin spreads across her face. “I claim the role of the brooding, sexy FBI agent with the troubled past from here on out.”

“So that means…”

“Brooding, sexy FBI agents don’t have counseling sessions with witnesses. They prowl in the background and look cool.”

_And you can’t take notes at all._

Sam rolls her eyes. “You’re an actual twelve-year-old,” she says. And it’s absolutely true, because she still remembers Dean at twelve years old. A scrawny, shaggy-headed semi-tomboy who secretly sought out women’s wrestling with a feverish intensity, because she was still trying to figure out how to be a girl who had just made her first sawed-off shotgun.

“Bitch.” Dean pokes the file into Sam’s arm as they climb the concrete step to the front door.

“Jerk.” Sam lets the k leave her in a little pop and accepts the file. Before she knocks, she takes a moment to tuck the file under one arm and reach out to adjust the lapels of her sister’s blazer. Dean, to Sam’s mild surprise, accepts the action with only a hitch of her eyebrows. Emboldened, Sam reaches up to tuck a long strand of dirty blond hair back into Dean’s bun (the “bitchy government employee hairdo” as Dean has labeled it) then lets her hands fall to her sides again.

“You know I’m not a complete invalid, right?” Dean asks, though there’s no malice in her voice. Sam straightens her own jacket in reply and reaches out to press the cracked doorbell.

A girl’s voice calls out, and then a shadow moves behind frosted glass. A suggestion of a head pauses there, taking them in, before the door creaks open and a plump woman looks out.

“Hi,” Sam reaches for her counterfeit badge and, for a split second, zeroes her attention on Dean as she pulls her own badge from her pocket. It flips open in Dean’s left hand, and Sam flicks her eyes back to the woman. “We’re with the FBI. I’m Agent Vanatta, this is Agent Burson. We’re investigating Rodrigo Barriola’s disappearance.”

The woman looks between them with dark brown eyes, her black hair disappearing into the shadow of the hall behind her. Her eyes linger on Sam for several moments longer. Sam smiles.

“I already spoke to the police,” the woman says.

“I understand,” Sam follows the script smoothly. “We’re conducting our own investigation. We’re thinking it may have to do with other disappearances in the area.”

The woman hasn’t opened the door more than halfway, and her lips are a thin slash across her face.

“We’re asking a few routine questions,” Sam tries. “Ten minutes. We’ll stay out here, if you like.”

The woman’s lips loosen.

“Not sure why the FBI is involved,” is all she says before stepping back and holding the door open. Sam snatches a glance at her sister, but Dean’s already stepping across the threshold with a firm clack of her cheap heels. Sam follows and thinks abruptly of the old legends about vampires, how they can’t hurt you in your home unless you invite them in.

The house is small and spare. The walls are rough, off-white and could use decoration, the carpet covered by an off-center braided rug. The sisters follow the woman past a living room where a girl with long, dark hair watches them pass with wide eyes, then into a small kitchen. It smells as if something was cooking here a while ago.

Dean and Sam sit at the kitchen table when the woman points at it. She stands near the stove, hands folded at her waist. She’s gained an aura of ferociousness now that they’re firmly in her territory, and Sam knows Dean will have to ask to use the bathroom if she wants to grab an EMF reading.

“I have work in an hour,” the woman tells them.

“This won’t take too long,” Sam flips open her notebook. “Are you related to Rodrigo? Ms...”

“Rocho’s my son,” the woman confirms. “I’m Ms. Barriola.”

“What can you tell us about the night Rodrigo disappeared?” Sam asks, looking up and rearranging her face into one of sympathy. Ms. Barriola regards it with tired wariness.

“I told the police this.”

“This is routine procedure for our separate report,” Dean offers, and Ms. Barriola’s hands loosen slightly.

“The night before last,” she says. “Rodrigo was in bed when I check in on him around eleven. Probably sneaking those magazines, but in bed.” She takes a deep breath, and Sam leans forward almost without realizing it. “I wake up at 3:30 in the morning when the front door closes. I sleep at the front of the house, so…but I go to the door and no one is anywhere. I check on the kids anyway and Rodrigo’s bed is empty. Me, I don’t think anything bad at first. He’s a teenager, I figure he sneaks out all the time without me knowing. But he also leaves his cell phone, and that’s a little weird. I start to worry and call the parents of his friends, but nothing. The next morning? Nothing. Not at school, not with friends, everything still left behind, so he didn’t run away, did he?” Ms. Barriola looks between the sisters. Her hands have clamped together again. She shrugs. “I call the police around eight yesterday. That’s enough for you?”

“Did he seem to be acting strange before he disappeared?” Sam asks. Ms. Barriola wordlessly shakes her head. “Saying anything really out of character?” A pause. “Any smell of sulfur? Rotten eggs?” Ms. Barriola’s entire face pinches at that.

“What?”

“Just part of the procedure,” Sam says, keeping her voice low. Ms. Barriola looks as if she’d love to toss both of them out right then, but her voice is composed when she answers. 

“Nothing like that, no.”

“Any cold spots?”

“Are you asking if my son was possessed?” Ms. Barriola seems to grow larger before them. “My son is missing and you’re asking about _sulfur_?”

Sam’s fingers pause over her notepad.

“We understand this is difficult,” she says, voice even. “We just need all the facts so we can bring him back.” Ms. Barriola doesn’t look impressed. Furious would be a more accurate description.

“Listen, I agree, it sounds ridiculous,” Dean leans forward and her face is open, guileless. “But they tell us there’s natural phenomena that can explain quote unquote odd events. Like the sulfur thing? Some kind of gas that makes people act nuts.” She leans back, holds up her left hand. “I mean, don’t ask us to explain it, we’re just the grunts. But the manual says to ask these kinds of questions, so we ask them. Protocol.”

Sam looks back down at her notebook and thinks that Dean’s so full of bullshit to claim that Sam’s the people person. Most of the time, Sam has to struggle just to appear normal. Dean breezes through it.

Ms. Barriola’s face shifts from incredulous to exasperated to resigned.

“No.” She all but throws up her hands. “No cold spots, no demonic chanting, no voodoo dolls. None of that.”

“Do you know of anyone who would want to harm your son?” Sam takes control with a slip of coolness to her voice, suddenly desiring to leave the house as soon as possible.

Ms. Barriola sighs, rubs at her eyes briefly. “I mean, he’s been in a fight or two. But harmless things. It’s practically how boys say hello.”

Dean snorts lightly. Sam glances at her, and her sister moves into a sudden stand. “I’m sorry, can I use the bathroom? The coffee went right through my system.”

Ms. Barriola gestures to the doorway after a long pause. “First door to the right,” she says, and Dean grins in thanks. Sam watches Ms. Barriola’s eyes track something at Dean’s waist, and it takes her a second to realize that she’s looking at the right hand. Sam looks back down at her notes as Dean exits.

“Now who else was in the house that night?”

The questioning drags on, stiff and tiring. Sam internally wills Dean to hurry up as she eventually tries to come up with questions that don’t seem too obviously staged for time. When she hears her sister’s heels approaching, Sam clicks her pen with a wave of relief.

“I think that’s as much as we need at the moment,” she says, then trails off when she notices Ms. Barriola’s gaze lock on whatever she sees in the doorway. Sam looks up to find Dean half-grinning apologetically, the little girl from the living room at her side. She’s clutching Dean’s good hand in both of her own, and she looks like a child who’s just found her new favorite toy.

“Mama,” she hangs from Dean’s hand slightly. “This lady’s hand was eaten by a tiger.”

“Paloma,” Ms. Barriola snaps. “Enough.” Paloma looks as if she’s weighing her options, then judiciously drops Dean’s hand and inches towards her mother. She chirps something in Spanish, and Sam hears the word “ _tigre_ ” before Ms. Barriola hushes at her.

Sam stands and moves towards Dean, trying to ask “what the hell?” via eyebrow. Dean ignores her.

“Sorry, Ms. Barriola, she was waiting for me when I got out of the bathroom,” Dean says. Ms. Barriola glances down at her daughter, who is asking something about cookies in a soft lilt.

“She’s very curious,” Ms. Barriola allows, then looks back up at the Winchesters. “That’s all?”

“It is,” Sam nods, then steps forward enough to hold out a business card. “If anything turns up, give us a call.”

“ _Ciao, se_ _ñora del tigre,_ ” Paloma shouts. Sam catches Dean’s mouth twitch in a smile, and has to battle equally matched feelings of irritation and fondness. Which is a common experience when Dean Winchester is your sister.

***

“Well?”

Dean fiddles at the radio dial. “Well what?” she asks. Sam turns on the engine and hides her sigh beneath its waking rattle.

“Find anything?”

Something plops into her lap, and Sam looks down to find a dirty gray bag wrapped with a length of twine.

“Witches?” she asks.

“Not my first choice either, Sammy. It was tucked underneath the kid’s bed. I bet the other two missing kids have the same deal. You asked her about anyone with access to the house, right?”

“Yeah.” Sam puts the car into drive and peels away from the curb. “We’ll have to see if we can cross-index it. And the girl? She see anything?”

“Nah, slept through the whole thing. Like I said, she ambushed me outside the bathroom. Wanted to know what I did to my hand.”

“Right.” Sam feels the positively wicked smile climbing towards her eyes. “The hand belonging to the sexy, brooding agent who looks cool and dangerous, was that it?”

“Fuck you, Samantha.” Dean toes off her heels and sticks her feet on the dashboard. “Fuck you sideways.”

“Your feet reek.”

“Serves you right.”

Sam drives for another minute, mentally shaking her head, before Dean speaks abruptly. “She told me she was scared she’d disappear next. So I told her I lost my fingers fighting a tiger, and I was scared too.” A pause. “She liked that. She had chutzpa.”

Sam makes a left turn onto another quiet street.

“You’re going to make her think she has to be hurt to be brave.”

Dean is silent beside her. “No,” she finally says, and doesn’t offer further explanation. Sam checks the address of the next disappeared boy, and doesn’t push it.

***

That evening, they sit in the motel room with two bags of fast food and a six-pack between them. Dean flips through an old witch’s tome they inherited from Bobby while Sam picks through the three hex bags, one under each disappeared boy’s bed.

“Looks like a canine.” Sam takes a swig from her beer and squints at the discolored animal tooth held between thumb and forefinger. “Any hexbag recipes that combine teeth with—what was it?” She looks back down at the bags’ contents spread before her. “We decided it was a quail feather?” Silence. “Dean?”

She turns to find Dean’s gaze fixed on the tooth, her face drawn. No, not on the tooth. Sam’s fingers. Maybe. Sam can’t tell. Sam puts the tooth back down on the tabletop and looks down as she wipes her hands on her jeans. She hears Dean shuffle a few pages.

“Quails are associated with group harmony, lust, love, and victory,” Dean recites, tapping the yellowed pages.

“Maybe someone is trying to get these guys to fall in love with them. They want victory, so like winning them over?” Sam suggests.

“I got it. Someone’s collecting their own man harem from the local neighborhood. Group harmony, right?”

“I’m sure that’s it,” Sam deadpans, sifting through a pile of ash in search of remnants.

“Dude, if I were a witch, why _wouldn’t_ I start my own collection of hot guys?” Dean asks. She frowns at the book. “Hang on, it says that cardinal feathers are better for romantic love, so maybe they just want the lust part.” Dean holds up a finger. “So my man harem theory is still completely viable.”

“And teeth?”

“Sam, literally every recipe in here uses bones or teeth, you’re gonna have to look it up and give me specifics.” Dean snags a few fries from her bag while Sam pulls her laptop closer and opens Google.

Dean abandons the book and picks up Sam’s notebook, ruffling a few pages forward.

“So there’s no one that all three of the boys knew, huh?” She squints at Sam’s sprawled handwriting.

“Ah, nope. Not even from the same social circles, as far as I could tell. Rodrigo was a student at the local high school, Oliver Delaney was a dropout who worked at the gas station and James Sitarsky went to community college. Literally, I don’t see any connection between them besides the fact that that they lived within a few blocks of each other.”

“It’s there,” Dean murmurs. “Just have to find it.” She snaps her fingers at Sam distractedly. “Come on, tooth research. Now.”

Sam calls her a name that earns her a paperclip in the eye.

After that, they sit in mulling silence, punctuated only with brief discussions and theories. It’s familiar, this slogging, research-laden portion of any hunt, and Sam settles into it willfully. All they need is Bobby calling them idjits and Castiel giving occasional perspective and Sam would gladly call it a perfect evening.

By the time the clock blinks one in the morning, they’ve decided that the tooth belongs to a dog, man harems are too an actual thing, and not much else.

“Okay,” Dean stretches, her entire back arching into the motion. “The text is starting to blur. I’m hitting the sack.” Sam grunts, eyes fixed on the screen. She absently listens to Dean get up to brush her teeth for far too short a time, muttering some song or another under her breath.

Somewhere, in the part of her mind not taken up by the symbolic nature of hawthorn wood, Sam decides that, despite what she’d have preferred, it was still a good idea to get them on the road again. Get them back on a hunt. Dean’s always been in a better mood when she has something to shoot.

Sam is aware that Dean has fallen silent for several minutes, and when she glances up, she finds her sister picking at her bandages with pursed lips. The clean bandages and ointment wait on the bed before her.

“Here.” Sam stands, then pauses when Dean jerks her hand closer to her torso.

“I need to learn to do this myself,” she says. Sam licks her lips uneasily.

“It’s not a big deal,” she says. Dean eyes her warily. “C’mon, I’ll do a better job anyway.”

Dean holds out another few seconds, probably for appearance’s sake, then releases a massive sigh and gestures at Sam as if to say, _if you must._

Sam hitches one folded leg onto the bed and picks up the roll of bandages to place it on her knee. “These motel comforters are swarming with germs, you shouldn’t put clean bandages on them,” she says, already hearing the reply.

“Oh my fucking god, Sam, we’ve practically built an iron-clad immunity to whatever these motels have. Get the stick out of your ass.”

“You still have open wounds,” Sam all but murmurs, peeling the bandages from her sister’s skin. “We’ll have to keep an eye on the stitches.” She hesitates. “How did no pain meds work for you?”

“Kinda a bitch.” Sam hesitates at that one, because she was expecting a nonchalant version of “fine.” She glances up and finds Dean staring at her mottled hand with her jaw clenched beneath her skin.

“You’re allowed,” Sam says in a low voice. Dean watches Sam discard the old bandages and apply the ointment. The gashes and stitches gleam wetly beneath its sheen, giving the reds and yellows vivid hues. Dean’s three fingers, middle, ring and pinkie, curl up like aborted commas.

“Ugly son of a bitch,” Dean says, breaking the silence. Sam begins enfolding the hand in soft, snowy white cloth.

***

_Hi Cas. We’re in Carbondale, Illinois right now. Going after some witches, we think. Dean’s probably already told you all of this, but she might also be giving you the silent treatment. I don’t know. She was cheerful enough today, but that doesn’t really mean anything._

_That apartment in Champaign is still there. I forgot to mention, I left one of my cell phones on the counter so you can call us. So if you come back—_

Sam twists onto her stomach and punches the pillow.

***

Sam and Dean stood side-by-side against the wall, shoulders pressed together. Sam had just about reached Dean’s height by then, so their bodies lined up neatly enough. Except for Sam’s mile-long legs. Dean had repeatedly told Sam that most women would kill for those legs.

Sam had disagreed, because there were sexy long legs, and there were _her_ legs: corded with muscle, mottled blue and purple and red from one hunt or another, not shaved half the time (or let’s face it, most of the time). But Sam never disliked her legs, mainly because they’d saved her life too many times to merit a grudge. She just wore jeans or a pantsuit and left it at that.

“Stop breathing a sec,” Dean muttered beside her, and Sam clicked her mouth shut. A whiff of sulfur lingered in her nostrils, which made no sense, because this was a standard ghost, not a demon.

Dean raised the salt gun and fired right as the image of a haggard-looking man materialized before them. Sam released her breath in a long whoosh.

“How’d you know?” she asked.

“There’s a rhythm to how they pop up,” Dean said, scratching the back of her neck with a touch of self-consciousness. “C’mon, the kitchen should be down the hall.”

Sam remembered this, as she foggily followed her big sister’s cat-like boot treads. One of the first times their dad had let them do their own hunt. He’d been kept busy with a rugaru a few counties over, had asked Dean and Sam if they thought they could handle a ghost. They had already done two similar hunts on their own, and Sam could feel Dean practically vibrate with energy.

“Yes sir,” Dean said, her back straight. “I think we can do it.”

Sam never heard it, but she knew John gave Dean one of the “look after Sammy” talks before they left. She could see it in the set of Dean’s jaw, the way her sister always had a hand hovering towards her.

Sam saw it again in the way Dean manhandled her into the kitchen before slamming the door shut and pouring a fat line of salt across the doorway. Sam flicked on the light and scouted the room briefly, but nothing looked out of place.

“Any idea _where_ in the kitchen this knife’s supposed to be?” Sam looked back toward Dean. Dean gestured to the cabinets with her gun.

“Just collect all of them and let me get a fire going.”

Sam yanked open a drawer and found a collection of what looked like potholders, then moved on to the next drawer as Dean clattered open the oven behind her.

And something…something had happened—was going to happen.

Dean yelped, and Sam whirled around to find the ragged afterimage of the man from the hallway standing at Dean’s eye level. His hands came down to wrap around Dean’s throat.

Sam lifted her rifle to shoot, because she remembered this was the first time she’d truly, legitimately saved Dean’s life.

Something shifts.

A blast of quiet, raging light fills the kitchen. Sam has to drop the gun so she can shield her eyes. When she looks up, everything has disappeared except for a paint smudge of hell fire in the distance. That, and a woman made more of light than body. Sam has to squint through hot eyeballs to look at her.

“Cas,” Sam utters, lowering her arms. “Oh my g—Cas!”

The woman looks at her, and Sam can almost see Jenny Novak’s blue eyes behind Castiel’s burning Grace-fire. Sam takes a tentative step forward.

“Sam?” Castiel says, the word like an earthworm that has been abruptly exposed by a gardener’s spade. It writhes in the space between them and Sam experiences a surge of frightened protectiveness at the pure vulnerability. She takes another step forward, watching the hell fire in the distance grow brighter.

Castiel lifts a hand uncertainly then looks around. “This is—“

She disappears in a small snap of light, like a firecracker, and the fire rushes forward to carry Sam up, up, far too high.

***

Sam wakes up slowly this time. The ceiling is dark above her, and Dean gurgles in her sleep. Doesn’t sound like she has angels exploding into her dreams at all. Sam slips out from beneath the covers and glides across the mangy motel carpet in swift steps. She’s in a half trance, blotches of red still floating across her retinas.

“Dean,” she whispers, and shoves at her sister’s shoulder. Dean grumbles something. “Dean!”

“Uuht?”

“Cas.”

Sam can all but see Dean muddily process the word before she drags herself to a sit and twists around to squint at Sam. Her green eyes flick around the room as if to find Castiel waiting there.

“Cas.” she repeats.

“She showed up in my dream.” Sam clambers onto the bed—Dean never bothered to actually crawl under the covers—and on impulse grabs both of Dean’s hands. She grips them, as if to impart how real this is. “Just now.”

“What did—shit, was she okay? How?” Dean rearranges herself into a cross-legged position, and Sam thinks dimly that they resemble two girls sharing secrets at a sleepover.

“I don’t know,” Sam shakes her head. “She was leaking light everywhere and she seemed confused—“

“No, hang on, back up, tell me everything,” Dean orders. Sam does so, watching Dean’s eyes grow darker and darker.

“She just popped out of existence?” Dean asks, her hands sagging in Sam’s. Sam lets them go.

“Yeah. I woke up right after.” Dean doesn’t say anything immediately, looking away with her fingers coming up to pick at her lower lip.

“This is probably bad,” she says after a full minute. “Shit.”

“Maybe she found a way out of Purgatory.”

“Yeah, and maybe God still gives a flying monkey’s ass,” Dean snaps, and swings off the bed. She stands there, hands hovering around her waist. Something breaks in Sam’s chest at the way those hands twitch like nervous birds.

She wants to call Bobby, suddenly. Because once upon a time, Bobby knew everything. But he’s dead now, just like dad and mom and Ellen and Jo and Rufus and Ash and everyone the Winchester sisters have ever bothered to love or care about or depend on.

Castiel, Sam thinks with a surge of anger, had no right to do this to them. If the angel had any sense of their lives, she wouldn’t have gotten herself stuck in Purgatory. Then maybe Sam wouldn’t have to try and herd a maimed, angry, heartbroken sister from one safe space to another all by herself.

Dean’s sigh comes in a gust as she turns back around and brings her hand up to ruffle her hair. Getting herself reoriented. Sam waits.

“So now what?” Dean drops her hand and glances at Sam. “We wait for her to pop up again?”

“Don’t see any other option, honestly,” Sam shrugs. “This may not be something we can, you know, actually _do_ anything about.” She sees the distaste cross Dean’s face before it slips back into something stonier.

“Yeah.” Dean peers at the clock momentarily, and Sam follows her gaze. Four in the morning.

“You should try for a few more hours,” Sam says, and Dean shrugs absently.

“I guess. You?”

“Might try staring at the files until a pattern pops out.” Dean shrugs again and waves her bandaged hand.

“Better you than me.”

Sam hesitates.

“Dean—“

Something in her face must have shown, because Dean scowls. “Stop, Sam, we’re not doing this now.” Sam hesitates, considers getting annoyed, then drops it. They’re both too drained for that.

Instead, Sam goes to the bathroom as Dean shuffles back to the bed (once again, apparently unable to pull back the sheets and actually go under them) and for several long moments Sam stands stock still just past the bathroom doorway. Her bare feet feel cool against the tile floor as she listens to Dean shift on the bedcovers and sigh. After a full minute of silence, Sam shuts the bathroom door.

She goes to the mirror and squints at her reflection in the fluorescent light. She looks puffy with sleep, eyes swamped in purple bags, a few of her acne scars red against her pale face. Nothing worse than usual after a few hour’s sleep.

Sam admits to herself she’d do well to follow her own advice and crawl back under the covers. But there’s those watery remnants of the Cage still swimming around her psyche, and there’s Castiel.

Sam bites her lips, then clasps her hands and lets them hang before her. She bows her head.

“Castiel,” she all but mouths, aware that Dean is probably still awake. “I have no idea what that just was. If that was you at all. I hope you’re still alive.”

She usually has more to say, can turn these prayers into veritable streams of consciousness that she’s sure equally annoy and amuse Castiel if she receives them at all. But now, Sam stares at the off-white sink and tastes the empty space on her tongue where words tend to spring so readily.

“Stay safe.”

She makes a hurried sign of the cross, as if someone is watching.

“Amen.”

***

Dean sleeps in and Sam doesn’t have the heart to wake her. So they’re not in the car until 11 a.m., and by 11:15 a.m., Dean is opening a McDonald’s bag and filling the Impala with the scent of McGriddle. Usually Sam would bitch about the smell, which invariably makes her stomach turn. (It’s the egg. As far as Sam’s concerned, fast food has no business touching eggs.)

But today, she rolls away from the drive-thru and tells herself it’s Dean’s consolation for not being able to drive the Impala for well over two weeks now. She’s still waiting for the moment when Dean will casually ask Sam to pull over in an empty parking lot on a free weekend and let her see how she does with the bandaged hand.

For now, Dean bites into the McGriddle and makes a sound just this side of orgasmic. Sam tosses a pile of papers in Dean’s lap and pulls into the flow of traffic.

“Can we talk now?” she asks. Dean swallows and glances at Sam with raised eyebrows.

“Sammy, you don’t interrupt a woman and her food. That’s one of the rules.”

“Does it come before or after taking a joint from a guy named Don?”

Dean snorts around her second bite of breakfast, and chews at Sam with a gaping mouth. Sam makes a show of gagging and shoving a free hand in Dean’s face, which just makes Dean giggle and nearly choke.

It feels downright normal, and by the time they roll in front of a small sporting goods store, Sam has lightness in her chest that all but defies the last few weeks. Hell, the last few months.

“Ok, so,” Dean crinkles the wrapper and tosses it on the floorboards with the bag. “What’d you find?”

“This.” Sam grabs the papers she left in Dean’s lap and flicks through them against the steering wheel. “So you know that tooth we found in all of the hex bags? We were saying dog, but that’s all wrong.”

“Is it?”

“I looked through one of Bobby’s books and I found this,” Sam holds up a page of text she copied out that morning. “It’s badger. Badger teeth, with _hawthorn_ —remember that?—and then quail feathers, and I’ll bet anything the ash we found was something from each of the victims.”

Dean takes the sheet from Sam and skims the neat handwriting. Sam watches her eyes sharpen before she looks up.

“This spell looks…really gross.”

“From what I could tell, our mystery witch was building a pretty powerful…like, lust/power/incarceration spell,” Sam tries, shaping the air in front of her with her hands. She shrugs. “It explains why the victims all seem to leave the house of their own accord. The witch would have been able to control them from a pretty good distance.”

“This is disgusting,” Dean’s still reading the sheet. “This is just a…thoroughly unpleasant way to be controlled.” She brings the page closer to her face. “Their livers literally—“

“Yeah, I get it, it’s gross,” Sam grimaces. “I figure our best lead is to try to find where they got the badger teeth. That sounds like the hardest ingredient to find.”

“They couldn’t have killed one on their own?” Dean asks, folding up the paper. “Illinois has badgers, doesn’t it?”

“Badgers are mean little shits,” Sam opens her door and unfolds from the Impala. “C’mon, we’re talking to a taxidermist.”

“Taxi—“ Dean scrambles from her seat and peers at her sister over the top of the car before turning her attention to the benign sporting goods store. “You’re saying they do taxidermy here? Why would they be handing out badger teeth?”

“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” Sam shrugs, looking down to lock the Impala. “We’re throwing things against the wall until something sticks; it’s the best we’ve got.”

Sam can all but hear Dean acquiesce to this. She looks back up in time to see Dean straighten her shirt and smooth out her features. With a small hitch of the lips meant to represent a smile, Sam leads them into the sporting goods store.

The man behind the counter is slim and bearded, maybe pushing forty, and he listens to Sam with creases deepening the corners of his eyes as Dean wanders around the background with her hands behind her back. His eyes flick towards Dean a little more often than is strictly necessary, but Sam honestly can’t tell if it’s because of the damaged hand or other pieces of her anatomy.

“Just the teeth, yer sayin’,” he says, nudging his cap to scratch at the hair beneath.

“It’s for a research project of mine,” Sam nods. “On native carnivores of Illinois.” She tries to channel her inner student with a hopeful, guileless smile. The man continues to look mildly perturbed by the whole thing. His eyes slide over to Dean again and linger there for a good thirty seconds.

“We get badgers, maybe, once or twice a year,” he says in a slow drawl. “And the customers always want to keep the teeth in there, I c’n tell you that much.”

“No, yeah, of course.” Sam nods so hard her ponytail bobs. “You have any idea of someone who has badger teeth on hand, then?”

“Ahh, you could try Randy.” The man pulls a pad of sticky notes to him and scrawls out a phone number. “He handles a lot of unusual projects from all over the Midwest. He might be able to help you out.”

“That’s great, thanks.” She accepts the sticky note and turns around just as Dean approaches Sam with a Davy Crockett style raccoon hat on her head.

“I just need a rifle,” she grins, and Sam rolls her eyes as she grabs the hat from Dean’s head, inciting a wince from her sister. She must have accidentally pulled out a few hairs.

“I c’n take care of that, ma’am,” the man says holding out a hand and staring at Dean in a manner that’s way, way too familiar. Sam throws the hat onto the counter and turns to leave, letting Dean handle the situation as she will.

“Wanna guess how I lost my fingers?” Dean asks, as if on cue.

“What?”

“Alligators in the Florida Keys.”

“Alligators—really?”

“They’d have gotten my whole arm if it wasn’t for the bazooka gun.”

“For god’s—“ Sam reaches back to grab Dean’s sleeve and all but drags her towards the door with a quick. “Thanksforyourhelphaveaniceday.”

Dean’s cracking up like she’s a teenager again when they let the door swing shut behind them, and Sam finds herself once again caught between scolding and trying to hold back her own laughter.

“What’s with you?” She settles for the scolding.

“C’mon, messing with dudes when they’re like that is great,” Dean says, reaching out to tug the Impala door open. “You can say literally anything and three out of five times, they try so hard to take you seriously.”

Sam has seen Dean pull this kind of stunt on nights when they’re in a bar and have alcohol singing in their veins and everything feels hilarious. But not on grimy Thursday mornings with shopkeepers. There’s something off about it, something a little hysterical in Dean’s continued snorts.

Sam watches Dean climb into the car and follows suit more slowly.

***

The phone call to Randy, which ends up in a voicemail, and a few other stops around town leave the Winchester sisters with about as many leads as they had that morning. That is to say, not much beyond badger teeth.

“Maybe we should go back to the houses and see if we can dig anything else up,” Dean says.

“Maybe,” Sam says vaguely, turning back into the motel parking lot.

“Do you think any of them are still alive?” Dean asks. Sam sees in her mind’s eye Rodrigo’s bright smile and curly hair. His mother’s firm, suppressed fear.

“Depends on how long the witch wants them to last,” Sam shrugs, and feels Dean give a small shudder.

“Fucking witches,” she says with feeling as Sam pulls the key from the ignition. Something in her voice, her posture, something Sam wouldn’t even be able to quantify if asked, makes Sam remain in the car and look at Dean with slightly parted lips.

Dean glances in her sister’s direction, as if in anticipation.

“You feeling okay?” Sam asks.

“My hand hurts like a motherfucker,” Dean offers. Silence again.

Ok then. It’s that dodge-and-weave game Dean plays sometimes when she’s off kilter and isn’t willing to be straightforward about it. That’s fine with Sam. She’s been tackling this game for years.

“Anything else?”

Dean’s left hand comes up to massage absently at her right hand, probably purely out of habit at this point, and looks at the steering wheel just in front of Sam.

“Cas?” Sam suggests.

Dean shoots Sam a nearly unreadable look. “What about Cas?”

“What are you thinking about? Concerning Cas?” Dean drops her hands and let them rest in her lap. They look like someone’s mismatched socks.

“Why’re we bringing this up now?”

“Because she popped into my dream last night,” Sam says.

“You’re right, there’s nothing we can do,” Dean answers. “You wanna dive into Purgatory after her?” A beat. “Suddenly saving people from monster heaven is worth your time?” Sam’s chest clenches so hard, her next breath comes out strained. She looks out of the windshield.

Dean clacks the door open after a full minute.

“C’mon, let’s see if we can still save those boys.” Sam watches her sister step out of the car before she reaches into the back seat to gather their papers. By the time she straightens, Dean has already disappeared into the room.

Sam takes a steadying breath, then flips through the papers once again as she climbs from the car and approaches the motel room’s door, as if an answer will fly into her face if she rereads the same information enough times.

Maybe that explains why, when Sam opens the door, the only warning she has is Dean shouting her name before something explodes across her head and abruptly turns off the world.

***

The diner could have been anywhere in America. Faded booth cushions, cheap, off-white dishes with cracks graying at the edges, the ketchup bottles and sweetener packets and smells off grease and coffee that intensified every time a waitress walked by.

Sam poked at her plate of hash browns and swam into the awareness that her dreams had led her into another memory.

Reluctantly, Sam looked out the window and found a wall of flame. The fumes of burning hair and meat mixed with the greasy coffee smell to produce a gut-wrenching odor.

She wondered whether Lucifer was out there. Michael and Adam.

“Sammy, get me the ketchup.” Sam looked up and the world seemed to click back in focus when he found a thirteen-year-old Dean next to him, gesturing to the ketchup sitting near the wall. Her face was littered with freckles and her hair stuck up from her scalp in purple-gray tufts. Sam handed Dean the bottle and recognized this as the fall they’d hung around California and the Pacific Northwest.

It was the hair. At the tail end of the summer, when they’d been left in the motel room for a full week, Dean had recruited Sam in Operation Dye Dean’s Hair Purple with Kool-Aid and Cut It Super Short.

Dad hadn’t said much of anything when he’d come back, only informed Dean that she couldn’t go on a hunt with him until her hair grew out some and the purple color had faded out.

“You’re not supposed to make yourself memorable,” he’d said as Sam watched Dean stand stiff and tall with her hand balled into fists at her sides. “Looking like a dyke is memorable.” That had been the last time Dean had worn her hair in anything but loose, shaggy ponytails or federal employee style buns. That had been the first time Sam truly understood what would happen if she told her dad that the doctors had gotten things all wrong when they’d called Sam a boy.

Perhaps out of sympathy for her sister’s inability to disappoint their father, Sam did it for her by categorically refusing to cut her hair for nearly three solid years. It had always been too long for a boy, but Sam wasn’t a boy anyway, and eventually it swung down to her waist in impressive waves. Dad hated it and Sam reveled in it. She invented ways to keep it out of the way during hunts, using bobby pins and hair ties. No matter how much her father or Dean told Sam that waist-length hair had no business on a hunter’s head, she held onto it with the kind of mulish stubbornness that dad swore came straight from Mary.

Even when she cut it right before heading off to Stanford, Sam never let her hair retreat past her shoulder blades. It felt like she’d be breaking a promise to do so.

“You gonna eat those?” Sam looked down at his hash browns, then back up at Dean. Her face flickered in the hellfire roaring at the diner window.

“Dude, you just had sausage and pancakes. You’re gonna get fat,” Sam said, giving a wicked gap-toothed grin.

“I work it all off killin’ monsters. What do you do? Read?”

“You could try it sometime,” Sam said, stabbing his fork into the hash browns and sensing their dad shift from across the table.

“Not so loud,” he murmured. He was flipping through a newspaper, his journal open at his right hand. Sam caught a glimpse of a half-finished sketch of what might have been a three-tailed dog.

Dean focused on scraping up the last of the maple syrup from her plate, while Sam stole back the ketchup to dump another dollop on his hash browns.

The fluorescent lights flicker.

Sam looks up and nearly makes a squeak of surprise.

Castiel stands an arm’s length from Dean, her trench coat and mental hospital clothes filthy and loose on her frame. Her eyes are fixed on Sam.

“Cas?” Sam drops her fork and scrambles to shove past Dean. Her sister doesn’t notice her or the strange woman with the terrifying gauntness to her cheeks. And why would she? This Dean is a memory, a dream.

Sam wonders why she’s still nine years old as she nearly trips out of the booth, then doesn’t care when she throws her arms around Castiel’s middle and buries her face in the filthy clothes.

She feels Castiel stiffen before her hands come to rest on the back of Sam’s head almost carefully. She smells sort of awful, but Sam can’t bring herself to care.

“Hello Sam,” Cas says. Her voice, if possible, sounds even more graveled than usual.

“Where have you—I mean, this is actually you, right? You’re not just part of my psyche?” Sam pulls away and experiences the disquieting sensation of tilting her head up to look at Castiel.

“I am me, yes. You’re dreaming lucidly, by the way,” Castiel says as if (read: most likely) reading her mind. “You have control here.”

“Right I—“ Sam blinks as she slides into her adult height then glances down at Castiel, who is peering at the hellfire raging beyond where young Dean is still scraping at her plate and John is reading his newspaper.

“Your mind is still a very ill place, Sam,” Castiel says in a thin voice. Sam eyes the fire as well.

“It used to be a lot worse,” she says impatiently. “You, what’s with you? What are you doing here?” Castiel tilts her head in a way that’s so achingly familiar Sam has to restrain the little tug in the middle of her chest.

“I have no idea,” Castiel says. Her voice is tight; it makes Sam think she might be annoyed. “I’d hoped you could tell me.”

“Uh. No,” Sam frowns. “So you’re not…” She hesitates.

“What?”

“I dunno. Visiting us? Trying to talk to us?”

 

Castiel squints. “Purgatory is as a singularity,” she says. “I have no chance of flying out and entering your dream. Technically speaking.”

“Ah,” Sam nods.

“You understand why this is worrisome?”

“I do.”

Sam glances at the diner window again out of habit. The fire licks at the cars in the parking lot, but it hasn’t snaked into the building yet. She has time.

“Do you have any guesses, at least?” Sam turns back to Castiel. “Anything at all?”

“I know that whatever’s pulling me from Purgatory sits on your side,” Castiel says. Her eyes also have drifted to the fire. She seems to be scrutinizing it. “And I think that they’re strong, but not strong enough.”

“How d’you mean?”

Castiel turns her attention back to Sam. “Dreams are odd,” she says. “They…they drift a little farther away from the hard, physical world. Whoever is moving me, it’s easier for them to pull me into a dream.”

“But you keep falling back into Purgatory,” Sam says.

“Right. So, they’re not strong enough to keep me here.”

“But why are you popping into _my_ head? Have you been in Dean’s dreams at all?”

Castiel’s brows lower. “I’ve appeared in Dean’s dreams a few times,” she says. “Not as often as yours.” Castiel shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t like this.”

Sam rubs at the side of her neck in thought. “I mean, maybe we have someone trying to spring you,” she says. “That can’t be all bad.”

“I’m not willing to bet on that,” Castiel says darkly. She scans the diner again like she thinks the nameless help might be hiding behind the jukebox. “I shouldn’t be here,” she says brusquely.

“Ok,” Sam says. “Let’s just…I dunno. We can figure this out. Dean and I can start researching.“

Castiel eyes the patrons seated at the bar. She doesn’t answer.

“Cas?”

“What happened to you?” Castiel asks. Her voice echoes against the diner’s walls.

“What?”

“This isn’t natural sleep.” Castiel says. She takes a step back to gaze up at the ceiling. “This dream has a pallid edge to it.”

Sam frowns.

Then it’s like a hammer blow, and she straightens with a lurch of panic in the back of her throat.

“Dean,” she utters. “They have me and Dean. I need to—“

“What’s the trouble?”

“Probably witches.” Sam sweeps her eyes around the diner, wondering how she wakes up from here. Is there an exit door?

“Sam.”

Sam snaps her head back to Castiel.

“Are you in danger? Is Dean in danger?”

Sam nods. Castiel’s shoulders roll slightly.

“All right,” she says. “I can help.”

“How?” Sam frowns, and Castiel’s eyes flick toward the small dream version of Dean, who’s ripping up straw wrappers and swinging her legs.

“It would hurt,” she says.

“What would?” Silence. “Cas, c’mon, we don’t have time.”

“I’m in your head right now, aren’t I?” Castiel says. “I can do a little from here. Extend my Grace, give you enough power to escape.”

“Really?”

“I’m not promising anything, but it should be enough.”

“What’ll happen to you?”

“Snap back to Purgatory, most likely.”

Sam presses her lips together, acutely aware that time may be passing much more quickly in the real world, aware that Dean is awake and that means she can be hurt. Aware that her body may be well and truly useless at this point.

Also painfully aware that she finally has Cas in front of her.

“Do it,” Sam says, nodding once. “But you’re going to keep on flickering into these dreams, right?”

Castiel makes a very human sounding snort. “I don’t appear to have much choice in the matter.”

“Then we’ll keep talking and we’ll figure this out.”

Castiel’s expression hardens. “You won’t.” The bottom drops out of Sam’s stomach.

“Cas—“

“You won’t, Sam.”

“Why the hell not?” Sam nearly yells, because maybe that will drown out the shot of fear.

“I don’t _want_ you to.” Castiel insists. “We have no idea who’s doing this or how dangerous they are. Better that I stay in Purgatory.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Before Castiel can reply, a sticky _woosh_ shatters the window. Sam whirls toward. The hell fire is somehow hot enough for Sam’s skin to singe and freezing enough to make her chest seize. A hand encircled her wrist.

“Sam,” Castiel’s voice comes from somewhere close. Sam can’t tear her eyes away from the fire. It swallows Dean and her dad without so much as a flicker.

Two fingers light against Sam’s forehead and everything disappears.

***

Sam does not drift into wakefulness, but rather slams into it. She inhales like a drowning woman who has just broken the surface, only aware of the tackiness covering the left side of her face after a few gasping breathes.

“Sam!”

Voices and scuffles surround her, but they filter through the pounding of blood and something else in her head. Something she can’t identify, something like plasma sifting through the space between her brain and skull and it’s shorting everything else out, and she’s not even sure whether her head is still intact.

She bows her head and opens her mouth until it feels like the edges of her mouth will split open, and she still can’t find the breath to scream.

“What the hell—“

“SAMMY!”

That’s Dean. Sam’s heard her name in that mouth enough times to identify it through the fire pumping through her head.

After that, she pieces together memories of witches and Dean and Castiel and flickering and Dean, and with a long, torturous effort, she peels her eyes open enough to find the blurry shape of her legs. Something is bathing them in unnatural light, and it’s the oddest sensation when Sam realizes the light is pouring from her own eyes.

Something beneath the light and fire brushes at Sam’s mind, and she jerks as the something lingers to press a firm warmth to her consciousness.

 _I’m sorry Sam. It’s done now._ The presence launches from her in one smooth motion, and several people scream.

The light ends with an abruptness that would sound like the last vibrations of a note that has already fallen out of hearing, if Sam had the mind to describe it. Instead she lets her head hang and screws her eyes up tight, even though it does absolutely nothing to dim the blinding afterimages of her own burning eyes.

Maybe moments pass. Maybe it’s minutes. But eventually (always) familiar hands grab either side of her face. “Sam. Fucking hell, Sam, you okay? Are you with me? Sammy!”

“Mmbd,” Sam dribbles out then lifts her head with a twinge. Her neck feels like she’s been craning it for hours and hours.

“ _Sammy_.” Sam peels her eyelids open to find Dean a few inches away, face taut with her patented cocktail of fury and abject terror. Dean has an angry looking bruise splayed across her left eye socket and a split lip that has only recently crusted over.

“’Mkay,” Sam mutters, licks her lips, and tries again. “I’m ‘kay.”

“What the _hell_ was that?” Dean’s face swoops out of view as she cranes her head to look around the room again. Sam wishes she wouldn’t. It makes her head spin.

“C’n ‘splain later,” Sam mutters, forcing a thick tongue out to swipe across deeply chapped lips. “Ge’ outta here.”

“Right,” Dean’s hands fall away from Sam’s face to land on her shoulders instead. “Right.”

That’s when Sam sees a blur of angry pink skin, and she would have reached out to snatch the damaged hand towards her, but she finds that her wrists are zip tied together. Instead she makes an angry sound and bends her neck to see Dean’s exposed hand with its missing fingers and now lack of black stitches.

“Wha’ they do?” she demands, trying to fit everything together as quickly as she can manage. “Wha’ they fucking do?”

“It’s nothing.”

“I’s not fuckin’ nothing, wha’ they do?” Sam can see freshly antagonized skin and neat beads of blood, and the sight of it makes her struggle harder.

“They’re dead now, okay?” Dean ducks her head to look Sam in the face. “So calm down.”

Sam reluctantly peers past Dean and the afterburn of her eyes to find three smoking bodies splayed across the room. Two women and a man. The man has a vaguely familiar cap that has toppled from his head, and Sam recognizes it with a little flutter in the pit of her stomach.

“Tha’—.”

“Yeah, the douche from the shop this morning,” Dean mutters darkly, ducking down with her pocketknife to saw at the zip ties holding Sam’s wrists together. “He must’ve grabbed something from us to find us.”

“Y’r hair,” Sam says, heart sinking. “Fr’m that stupid raccoon hat.”

Dean pauses, then continues sawing with renewed vigor. Sam watches the push and pull of her sister’s shoulder, searching for any falter or shudder.

“The victims,” Sam shifts and freezes at the splash of pain across the right side of her head. “They here?”

“Didn’t see anything,” Dean says, and with a final snap, the zip ties break. Blood that Sam had not realizes was cut off rushes back into her hands. “From the way they were talking, at least two of them are still alive.”

“We need to find ‘em.”

“You just downed three witches with laser vision, Sam, you’re not going anywhere except a bed.”

“Fine. Here, let me see.” Sam fumbles with too-large hands to find Dean’s injured one. She can feel Dean vibrating with the discomfort of being the recipient of the caretaking and not the giver, but as far as Sam’s concerned, Dean can shove it all where the sun doesn’t shine.

“They tore open the stitches,” Sam murmurs, tracing the air just above where blood beads on thin skin. “Goddamn it, Dean, they tore everything back open.” She feels at the firm bones. “Did they break anything?”

“Probably not,” is the eventual reply, and Sam wishes yet again, perhaps harder than ever, that Castiel would show up and help them with this. She wonders if Castiel can hear her right now, and throws out a mental, _I don’t care if you want to stay in Purgatory, we’re dragging you back somehow._

She imagines Castiel giving her an eye roll.

“We need to find a hospital,” Sam says, finally releasing the hand and letting Dean tuck it gingerly into her midsection. “We need to find the victims and get all of you to a hospital.”

“If I’m going, you’re going,” Dean says gruffly. “Your head is sort of bashed open there.”

Sam brings up one hand to gingerly probe at the clotted lump swelling just above her temple. Nothing feels broken. She’ll just have a mild concussion, probably. She’s had worse.

“It’s fine.” Sam grits her teeth and lurches to a stand, only swaying a little. She can all but hear Dean’s angry inner monologue at this point about how Sam’s a stubborn little shit. Which, frankly, calls to mind phrases involving “pot,” “kettle,” and “black.”

“Let’s go,” Sam says.

***

Dean’s right hand keeps drawing Sam’s attention like a bad car accident. It rests in Dean’s lap, its fingers slightly curled as if trying to protect something invisible in the palm.

They sit in the Impala a little down the street from a perfectly normal looking suburban home. The lawn and driveway swarm with media and emergency personnel.

“There,” Dean says, and Sam looks up from the hand just in time to see paramedics roll out a stretcher containing a tall young man with a military haircut. Sam can’t see his face due to the oxygen mask, but she recalls the gaunt, slack-jawed figure they found locked in a guest bedroom with a wide-eyed Rodrigo. The boy hadn’t been conscious, and neither Sam nor Dean could determine how bad off he’d been.

Rodrigo follows in a wheelchair pushed by another paramedic. His thin wrists dangle towards his lap, and he looks around the circus surrounding him as if searching for someone.

No third boy will follow, and Sam is sure that the police will eventually find his remains somewhere in the house or on the property days later.

The thought is sour in her mouth, so Sam instead tries to envision Rodrigo’s mother receiving the call that her son has been found and is alive.

“I liked him,” Dean says suddenly, eyes locked on the boy in the wheelchair. “He didn’t lose it too badly.”

They watch Rodrigo get ushered into the ambulance before Dean heaves a gusting sigh and leans her head against the headrest.

“So we don’t know why they wanted to kill these kids?” she asks. Her voice is tired. Flat.

“From what Rodrigo was describing, it sounded like they were collecting sacrifices for a pretty powerful summoning,” Sam shrugs. “Who knows what they were going after, though? Unless they gave you an evil plot monologue while I was out.”

Dean snorts.

“Dude, our jobs would be so much easier if we had more evil plot monologues.” Sam finds herself glancing at Dean and staying there, watching the exact cadence of her breathes and the way in which she holds her shoulders.

“What _did_ they do, if not an evil monologue?” she asks. Dean shrugs. It’s tighter than usual.

“Just slapped me around a little. They knew we were hunters, just wanted to scare us and then kill us, probably.”

“And that involved tearing open your stitches, apparently.”

“Oh lord,” Dean mutters, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

“Dean, they tortured you.”

“And what the hell is new about Winchesters getting tortured?” Dean snaps. And there. Right there. Suddenly Sam finds the snag of something she’d seen but couldn’t identify.

Sam’s eyes drop back down to Dean’s hand as if of their own accord, and she thinks about the fact that she was knocked out, but the witches apparently felt confident enough to leave Dean conscious.

“We should get you to someone to clean that up,” Sam says at the hand.

“How fit are you to drive?”

“I’m good.”

“Bullshit, you just had light crawling out of your eyes.” Sam lifts her eyes back up to Dean and wonders if her sister has already guessed what, or rather who, burned out from Sam. They watch each other warily for a moment. “Want to explain?” Dean prompts.

Sam sighs and drums at the steering wheel while she gets her thoughts in order.

“Cas showed up in my head again when I got knocked out.”

Dean licks her lips. “So she’s alright?”

“Yeah. She’s um, she’s apparently popping into my dreams. She’s not sure why, but she thinks someone’s tugging her back into this world.”

(Cas doesn’t want help and she doesn’t want to come back.)

Dean is silent a long moment. “How she look?” she asks.

“Beaten up.” Sam watches Dean stare a hole into the dashboard, left hand curling and uncurling. She wants to say something comforting, but her head, honestly, is still rattled and she only knows how to sit and wish her sister didn’t have that tension in her neck and shoulders.

“We might be able to get her out,” Sam continues after a while. “Someone seems to want her out of Purgatory; maybe we can jump in. I mean, she was able to act through me. Maybe we can pull her out through the dreams.”

Dean peers at her, eyes too hooded to be called hopeful. “How?”

Sam shrugs. “We can figure it out. Research—“

“Yeah okay.”

Sam shifts in her seat, then sticks the key into the ignition to pull the Impala forward. Her stomach churns.

***

Anthony Peterson is a slight man in the inner suburbs of Chicago with an affinity for FIFA and three-fourths of a medical degree.

He’s also the nearest source of medical care that Dean is willing to submit to, and after an hour-long shouting match in the car, Sam drives them to his apartment instead of an urgent care center in a huff of self-righteous irritation.

He opens his door with the wariness that anyone in the hunter community would recognize, and he takes a moment to process the sight of the two women before him before he breaks into a mild grin.

“The Winchesters,” he opens the door further to reveal a small, sparse room. A TV set in the corner shows miniature soccer players bouncing around a green field like toy soldiers. “Thought you two were dead or detained.”

“Got close,” Dean says, stepping across a battered rug. When Sam follows, she glances down to find the edges of a devil’s trap. “You available this evening, Peterson?”

“Free as a bird.” Anthony closes the door behind them and juts his jaw towards Dean’s hand. “Need me to take a look at that, then?” Dean peels away the towel Sam had insisted she wrap around it, and elicits a low whistle from Anthony.

“Did a werewolf get hold of you or something?” he asks, leaning forward.

“Something like that,” Dean says.

“Let me get the table cleared off and we’ll see what I can do. Wait here a mo’.”

Dean wraps her hand again and looks toward the TV. The movement leaves her hair caught in a bar of rapidly setting sunlight, and Sam sees dried blood clotted in the dirty blonde strands.

“Hold still,” Sam orders, and reaches out to pick the clots out. They slide down the length of Dean’s hair like beads on a string then crumble into black powder in Sam’s fingers. Dean complies with the grooming until the worst is gone and she’s left with a few chunks of hair dyed rusty red. Sam pushes the hair aside to find a shallow graze scraped across Dean’s skull.

“Is this where they first nabbed you?” she asks, letting her fingers fall away, and the hair cover the wound again.

“That came later,” Dean says, still watching the soccer match. “They just grabbed me at first. Right around the middle.”

Sam sticks her hands in her pockets to peer towards the kitchen. Anthony’s red-brown shoulder appears briefly before disappearing again. The sun has set enough for Sam to look in the window and find her and Dean’s reflections. She stands tall and stoop-shouldered, ponytail falling out in clumps around her face. Dean looks downright short beside her—even though she’s tall in her own right—but her shoulders are thrown back, her hair in a dirty yellow sheet at her shoulders, and her chin is raised as if daring anyone to approach. Even Sam. Especially Sam.

“Winchester.” Both women look towards the kitchen to find Anthony peeling on some rubber gloves. The action reminds Sam why she agreed to this in the end. There are a lot of questionable medical providers in the hunter community, but at least Anthony Peterson presents fewer questions than others.

Dean strides toward the kitchen and Sam follows after a moment’s hesitation. Anthony has cleared off the kitchen table and laid down a towel. A thick bag sits on a nearby counter, and Anthony grabs it as he sits in the chair across from Dean.

“Ookay,” he breathes out as he lands in his chair. “Let’s see it.”

The three of them sit in silence save for the distant sound of the soccer match from the next room. Sam watches Anthony’s slim hands handle Dean’s mangled one, and she thinks that Anthony must have been aiming for something in surgery. His hands look like the right kind for surgery.

“These aren’t fresh wounds,” Anthony says after a moment, glancing up with mild confusion written across his brow. Sam looks pointedly at Dean.

“I had this all stitched up and bandaged before,” Dean explains, voice sounding somehow muffled. “Some witches got to it. Picked everything apart.” Anthony winces in sympathy and lays the hand down to root through his bag and pull out a few bottles and sewing pack.

“Need something to bite?” he asks.

“I’m okay,” Dean shifts in her seat, splays her legs a little more and rests her left hand on her left knee, forming a stern right angle out of her elbow.

Sam leans against the counter and watches as Anthony reconfigures the bloody mess into a hand again. She didn’t get to watch it happen last time, and pays attention to every movement of needle and thread, every way that he holds together flaps of skin. It’s a sort of art form, and Sam wonders how Anthony got thrown off his medical degree track. How anyone gets thrown off otherwise normal and successful tracks in this life, she supposes. Werewolves. Vampires. Demons that burn your mother and girlfriend on the ceiling.

“You have a few broken bones, I’d guess,” Anthony says after a long twenty minutes, gently feeling at the skin. “Those new, or already there?”

“Already there. The doctor didn’t want to risk infecting the open wounds under a cast,” Sam says. Dean doesn’t look in her direction. Anthony nods.

“I’d probably agree,” he says. “I’ll wrap this up for you and see what I have as far as pain killers.”

“We have pain killers,” Dean says abruptly.

“You’ll want more eventually,” Anthony says, unruffled. “Here, I got some that won’t get you too drowsy, yeah?”

A moment of silence.

“That sounds good,” Sam says, and Anthony nods as he pulls gauze from his bag, even as Dean shoots Sam a dirty look.

When Anthony finishes bandaging the hand, he ducks toward a lower kitchen cabinet and emerges with two rattling orange bottles. Sam asks if he has any of her brand of estrogen pills on hand, and Anthony disappears a second time to fetch her request. He and Sam negotiate a price, and the money and merchandise is passed with quiet efficiency. Dean watches the whole tableau with growing blankness.

“Ok,” Anthony collects his medical supplies. “Here are the rules, Winchester. For god’s sake, keep that hand out of trouble. Otherwise you’re looking at an infection, and that screws up your whole year. Keep on the antibiotics.” He hesitates a moment. “You may want to take it easy for a few weeks.” He shoots a look at Sam, in clear communication that it’s going to have to be Sam’s job to make this happen.

Sam wonders if this is what the “take care of Sammy” talk feels like.

“And get to someone if it gets worse,” Anthony finishes. “You’re not out of the woods yet on that hand, don’t be stupid about it.”

“Yep,” Dean stands with a scrape of chair legs against linoleum. “I appreciate it, Anthony.” She sticks out her left hand, and Anthony shakes it with a small, professional smile. “Sam?”

“I need to use the bathroom real quick,” Sam says, and Anthony points her down a narrow hall. Sam can feel Dean watching her as she leaves the kitchen, but her head is pounding, and at some point she has to stop worrying about every time Dean is pissed at her.

Her reflection looks no better than it did the night before, Sam notes. The clot on her temple doesn’t help, and she ends up spending nearly ten minutes washing blood from her skin.

When she emerges from the bathroom, Anthony is watching soccer again on a couch. He straightens as Sam approaches. Dean is nowhere in sight.

“She went down to wait for you in the car,” he relays, tipping his head towards the door.

“Thanks,” Sam reaches up to tug fingers compulsively through her hair. “Sorry she was being sort of…” she shrugs.

“I’ve been nearly walloped by people who trip in here,” Anthony shrugs, his dark features flickering in the TV’s green light. “I can work with crabby patients.” He gestures at Sam’s face. “You want a gauze for that?”

“Um, no that’s fine,” Sam says, then falters at the expression Anthony gives her. “I mean, maybe?”

“All you hunter folk,” Anthony tilts up from the couch and goes into the kitchen again. “You’re all the biggest lot of masochists I’ve ever seen.”

“It comes in a package deal with the PTSD and alcoholism,” Sam says, following Anthony, and earns a guffaw from the man.

“That’s clever.” He’s still grinning as he rips open a gauze package and reaches out to tape it to Sam’s temple. It’s the pre-ointment covered ones, and the fabric feels oily against Sam’s skin. “But in all seriousness,” he continues as his hands fall away. “Try to make sure your sister keeps that hand relatively safe. She loses that hand, it's probably as much of a retirement as our kind can manage.”

“Dean wouldn’t know how to handle retirement,” Sam says without thinking, and the look Anthony gives her is far too understanding.

***

They drive away from Chicago for nearly five hours straight. Sam asks Dean if she has any destination in mind, but never receives any straightforward answers, so she picks a direction and starts driving.

When she starts getting worried about literally falling asleep at the wheel, she pulls over on a stretch of road somewhere west of Lincoln, Nebraska and turns off the engine.

Usually, she might suggest they grab a few beers they have stashed in the back and see if the stars are any good for watching. Instead she opens the car door and rounds to the back seat. Whenever they sleep on the road like this, Sam always gets the back seat. Dean likes being close to her Baby’s engine, or something.

Sam wads up her jacket and sticks it under her head, bending her knees a little to fit comfortably in the small space. She can see Dean still sitting in the front passenger seat, legs hiked up so her knees graze her chin. Sam releases a huff of air and buries her face in her musty jacket, not so much drifting into sleep as falling toward it at alarming rates.

Which is why she can’t make out what Dean is saying, though she hears the vibration of her voice.

Neither has spoken a word in the last five hours, and the sound makes Sam’s heart skip a beat. She drags her face from her jacket and squints through the gloom to make out an outline of shaggy, dirty blonde hair and a taut shoulder line.

“What?” she says. Her voice comes out in a creak.

“Sorry.” Dean says the word like it’s an ugly piece of jewelry. Oppressive silence pools in the Impala.

“Sorry?” Sam parrots blankly. She hoists herself onto an elbow, waits to see if Dean’s going to give her anything else to work with. “For what?”

“What d’you think, dumbass?”

“Oh no,” Sam tilts into a sit, one hand held out in a shushing motion. “No, Dean Winchester, you are not allowed—no.” She feels downright tipsy. Slap happy.

Dean twists in her seat and Sam finds her features stuck in a gargoyle of annoyance.

“You,” Sam points at Dean very deliberately, “do not get to play…fucking saint martyr. Again. You,” and Sam is honestly enjoying the range of emotions flitting across her sister’s face, “are only going to apologize for being a complete _douche_ to me,” she sends the finger she’s been pointing at Dean zipping across the space between them, “all day.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“No, you’re trying to sneak in an apology for having a fucked up hand and not being able to fight witches properly and some shit about not taking care of me. Sorry man, but if you really need to apologize to someone for being _injured_ , then go find dad. Oh wait!” Sam opens shapes her mouth into a mock-surprised “O” “he’s not here anymore. _So there’s no one to fucking apologize to._ ”

“Fuck you,” Dean spits, and suddenly her good hand is flying around the seat to crush into Sam’s face.

An odd bubbling sound fills the car, and it takes a moment for Sam to realize that it’s her own laughter. She’s sprawled across the back seat and her nose throbs in waves.

“Really,” she shifts toward the figure in the front seat. “You really want to do this.”

“I fucking swear, Sam, don’t you push me.”

“Oh nice. You’ve been pushing me all day. There’s no where else to go.” Sam can practically hear the electricity sparking before Dean is clattering the door open and Sam is scrambling through the opposite side of the car.

They meet in front of the hood, in a thud of bodies and a tangle of limbs. They’re not practicing anything close to proper fighting technique. Instead, they wrestle each other like they’re kids again, all scrappy, jerking knees and tangles of hair and sharp jabs in the ribs. Sam is bigger but Dean fights dirtier, so in the end they’re evenly matched. Sam finds Dean’s good hand trying to find purchase on her arm, and jabs her thumb into her eye. Dean releases a stuttering shout, and Sam takes the opportunity to hook her leg behind her sister’s knee and force her to the ground.

A few minutes and it’s already over, Dean keeled over in the dust on the side of an empty Nebraska road and Sam still gripping her wrist in an awkward angle that could turn into another broken hand if Sam pushes the right way.

She lets it go and steps back. Dean leans against the Impala’s grill like she’s seeking the refuge of a mother, and Sam sucks in deep breathes from the sudden bought of adrenaline and waits for Dean to look up again.

When she doesn’t for several minutes, Sam gives in to the fact that she’d still tired as all get out, and plops in the dirt beside Dean. She pokes Dean with her elbow.

“Didn’t damage anything did I?” she asks. Dean holds up her bandaged hand.

“I can’t believe you attacked an invalid,” she says, voice low and wry. Sam coughs a laugh.

“I’ve been driving all day, I’m exhausted,” she counters. “We’re equal.”

The words ring a little against the Impala’s metal, and Sam thunks her head against it to look up at the sky. All cloudy. No good for star watching anyway.

“Okay,” Dean shifts in the dirt and looks up through a mat of greasy hair. “Uncle. I’m sorry for being a douche all day.”

“Yes you are,” Sam flicks her forehead. It’s like turning on a switch, and Dean’s crow’s feet grow from the corners of her eyes like streams. Or roots.

“God, I’m going to fall asleep right here,” Sam slurs a little. “Riiight here.”

“We could do it,” Dean says, unconcerned. “It’s nice weather.”

“When did we last sleep outside?”

“Hell if I know.”

“We should do that. Sleep outside.”

“Yeah, I said that.”

“It could be like a slumber party.”

“You’ve never been on a slumber party, Sammy.”

“Now’s the time to start. And you’re a jerk.”

“Bitch.”

Sam shifts in the dirt and considers that leaning against the car isn’t comfortable at all. She voices this opinion, and hears Dean sigh before rocking to a stand and moving towards the backseat, to where various miscellanea are stored on the floorboards. The door slams again, and when Dean reappears, she has the three blankets that Sam carried into the apartment a week ago for them to sleep on. Sam wants to laugh.

“What?” Dean asks in response to the goofy smile.

“Nothing,” Sam says. Everything.

Dean spreads two blankets on the ground and leaves one for cover. Sam knee-walks over and sprawls on the scratchy wool. She holds up a hand in indication that Dean should join her.

“Someone shows up, they’re going to think we’re a couple of lesbians doing some post-coital cuddling,” Dean says.

"That’d be funny.”

“No it wouldn’t.” This last phrase comes from close by, since Dean has just stretched out beside Sam. Not close enough to be necessarily spooning, but near enough for Sam to hear her breathing and feel her heat. It’s good.

***

Sam is out like a light and she doesn’t dream at all.


End file.
